The Android Developers Keynote: A Closer Look at the Latest Updates and Features

One of the biggest announcements today came in the form of privacy and security, which is a crucial aspect that developers have been requesting for quite some time now. Google Now includes a privacy dashboard in Android 12, which gives users a clean and quick overview of which app has accessed their information and how many times. This feature provides a single platform to monitor all apps on the device, including stock ones.

For instance, every time Google Maps uses your location, it will show up here for you to review. The dashboard also gives users information on how their data was used, such as if a permission was used in the background and in some cases, how long an application used a particular permission. This feature should work with every app on the device.

If users become concerned and want to revoke a permission, there is a shortcut to the permission manager that makes it easy to do so. Another useful feature is the new mic and camera indicators, which appear when an application actually turns your mic and camera on and remains there until they turn off. Mic and camera use has been a long-standing concern of many privacy-minded folks, so this should help alleviate some of those concerns.

Tap the indicator at any time to find out which applications are actually using your microphone or camera at that moment, and there is a quick settings button to revoke mic and camera permissions for the whole phone. This feature was not available in the beta but will be coming soon.

Another security feature that Google is enhancing is the addition of approximate locations when you grant location permission. Now, users can choose to grant a precise location like they would for navigation or approximate location for applications that don't need to know exactly where you are. For instance, you can give something like a weather application approximate location since that's all it really needs.

Finally, Google is improving and enhancing its Android Private Compute Core, which is the function that lets things like live captions and auto replies work on your phone. The enhancements allow it to work without access to any network further increasing privacy. Plus, it's entirely open source, so the privacy community can comb through it and see for themselves.

The Google I/O keynote also included a redesign of the Android operating system, which is aimed at creating something that is clean, cohesive, and consistent. The ability to scroll down and see more information across all OS-level apps and menus is improved, with better spacing and higher legibility. This adds up to an easier-to-use operating system that actually flows nicely.

The redesign doesn't change the look of things so much as it glues almost all the existing elements together, creating a material design in its full final form. Some may be disappointed to see that the redesign doesn't change everything but this is by far the best material design has looked in a very long time.

The privacy features seem neat and it's good that Google is finally giving people the power to monitor apps and services on their devices, which was only doable through apps for many years. The mic and camera indicators and the toggle that turns them off phone-wide are long-overdue and appreciated by users.

It's worth noting that this is a reasonably good update for privacy-minded people, but we'll have to wait for future betas and the potential release of Android 12 to actually experience everything fully. If you're willing to take the risk of installing a beta, it should be stable enough for you. However, if stability is a concern, you may want to wait until the full release.

The Easter egg for Android 11 has not been revealed yet and can still be found in this beta version on my Pixel 4. We'll have to learn more about that one at a later date.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello again ladies and gentlemen i'm joe handy from android authority and today we're going to talk about the first android 12 beta release and this one came with a little bit of a surprise oh and before we start let's learn what the s in android s stands for so we have this letter associated with the release and every year the question is what does that letter stand for and i'm here to tell you we are here to tell you that it stands for android 12. i'm sorry we're engineers we deal with numbers and we better get used to it all right fair enough chet let's get started that's right folks this year we're getting the redesign that a lot of us have been asking for the last major redesign was in 2014 with the birth of material design so it's been a few years since we've seen something different the new design is called material u which tells us that it's actually a branch off of material design instead of its own brand new thing for the new design google wanted to go with something that adapts to the user as they use the device in a way that google says makes the device feel more alive one of the examples they gave us was the lock screen if you pick up your phone the lock screen lights up from the bottom but if you hit the power button it lights up from the side instead this theme is apparent across the entire os there are little animations all over the place that make things feel a lot more reactive swiping notifications away on the lock screen causes the shapes to change and it works identically in the notification panel for some nice continuity these little touches feel less utilitarian and a little more fluid right down to the notifications showing up at the bottom of the screen instead of the top for people with tall devices it all actually looks pretty nice the next part we'll talk about is the quick settings the toggles are entirely gone and replaced with small cards you'll see fewer cards than you did toggles but each card is cleanly labeled easy to understand and contains more information than the toggle buttons did in previous versions of android the cards match the general shape of the media player from android 11 so everything blends together nicely you may also notice these little burst animations when you tap on the quick settings buttons this is also a new theming element that is actually present on most button presses across the os of course the settings menu got a redesign as well and yes it's reminiscent of samsung's one ui google wanted to focus on legibility so they tweaked the spacing and size of everything so it's easier to see and to read the overscroll looks similar but it was also rebuilt from the ground up if you scroll to the top you'll see large banner text so that people with large phones can hit the topmost options without readjusting the phones in their hands the other big thing google added was something they're calling color extraction basically you set a wallpaper and the os identifies the prominent and complementary colors it then uses those colors to auto theme various parts of the os such as the volume rocker quick settings regular settings widgets and even places like the keyboard and stock messaging app we're sure this will reach other apps as well as developers start to adopt it most of this takes place in the wallpaper and style screen that you can access by long pressing the home screen it shows you the colors it extracts from the wallpaper after you choose one of course you can override the color extraction feature and choose the colors you want as well yes friends it only took 14 years but we have proper if somewhat basic theming in stock android i don't know about you but that makes me a happy camper unfortunately the theming engine isn't live in the beta but it should be in a future release some other changes include more streamlined widgets a revamped pin entry screen on the lock screen a wider color palette used by the os new app splash screens and launch animations and a whole lot more i refer you to the articles and videos in the description for more details google announced and talked about some of the new android 12 features this year google i o so let's dig into those a little bit one of the new features discussed at google i o is the ability to use a long press of the power button to summon google assistant this is very reminiscent of bixby on older samsung devices but assistant is kind of better so we don't think as many people will mind this is available under the gesture portion of the settings menu of course a lot of the elements of the power menu such as controlling your house lights or activating google pay has been relegated to the quick settings menu so you still have quick access to all of those things google also mentioned their competing service with apple's car key the digital car key feature is baked into the os just like apple's car key it'll use nfc to unlock your car and you can share your digital key with a friend if needed this feature will roll out slowly to google pixel and samsung galaxy smartphones later this year finally we'll talk briefly about the baked in android tv remote in android 12. it's really a small thing but it lets you connect to your android tv in the event that you lose your remote and control things directly from your phone it doesn't seem like they added a lot of new features in the beta release but do check out our previous video on android 12 for the other features that they were already working on such as haptic feedback paired with audio gesture control tweaks and some other stuff so after the google i o keynote there was actually a second keynote for android developers specifically that outlines some of the under the hood changes i'll briefly touch on some of the stuff they talked about but most of it like the avif support is in our previous android 12 video so we'll only mention the new stuff in this video some of the improvements under the hood are coming to picture-in-picture mode specifically the animation of actually getting content from full view to the smaller window this is something we'll have to wait for developers to include before we can see it in action but it seems like it's going to be a positive change another new feature is the ability to natively blur content it's actually an old feature that dates back to the first version of android but developers will be able to blur content now that phones have powerful enough processors to do it quickly without issue one thing the developers talked about was the ability to transcode video from formats an app doesn't support 2h.264 which most apps do support this is an api level change that developers can use it isn't the biggest problem but it helps consolidate all of the various formats into a single one for developers who can't add support for everything the android clipboard is also getting just a little bit of a revamp the google engineers want users to know when an application is asking for clipboard data and a beautiful toast message will pop up letting you know that an application is accessing said clipboard data of course there are some other smaller things as well check out the android developers keynote linked in the video description below for more details it's only about 29 minutes long and it has way more info some of the biggest announcements today came in the form of privacy and security to start google now includes a privacy dashboard in android 12 it gives you a clean and quick overview of which app's accessed your information and how many times for instance every time google maps uses your location it'll show up here for you to review the dashboard also gives you information on how your data was used for instance it'll tell you if a permission was used in the background and in some cases how long an application used a particular permission it should work with every application on your device even the stock ones there is a shortcut to the permission manager in case you become concerned and want to revoke a permission another useful feature is the new mic and camera indicators these indicators appear when an application actually turns your mic and camera on and remains there until they turn off mic in camera use is a long-standing concern of many privacy-minded folks so hopefully this helps you can tap the indicator at any time to find out which applications are actually using your micro camera at that moment and there is a quick settings button to revoke mic and camera permissions for the whole phone this wasn't available in the beta and neither was the privacy dashboard but we do know that it's coming another security feature is the addition of approximate locations when you grant location permission you can choose to grant a precise location like you would for navigation or approximate location for applications that don't need to know exactly where you are thus you can give something like a weather application approximate location since that's all it really needs finally google is improving and enhancing its android private compute core this is the function that lets things like live captions and auto replies work on your phone the enhancements allow it to work without access to any network further increasing privacy plus it's entirely open source so the privacy community can comb through it and see for themselves as usual you can check out our previous android 12 video if you want to see the rest of the new privacy features after reading through the press briefing it seems google wanted everybody to know that the purpose of this redesign was to create something that is clean cohesive and consistent the ability to scroll down and see more information across all os level apps and menus the better spacing the higher legibility it all adds up to an easier to use operating system that actually flows nicely everything that moves gotta refresh and now everything moves the same the redesign doesn't change the look of things so much as it glues almost all the existing elements together it's like material design in its full final form some may be disappointed to see that the redesign doesn't change everything but this is by far the best material design has looked in a very long time the privacy features seem neat and it's good that google is finally giving people the power to monitor apps and services on their devices this functionality was only doable through apps for many many years little touches like the mic and camera indicators and the toggle that turns them off phone wide is long overdue and appreciated all in all this is a reasonably good update for privacy-minded people of course we'll have to wait for future betas and the potential future release to actually experience everything so i reserve at least some judgement until then however this is shaping up to be among the best android releases in recent memory that said whether or not you should install this and run it is entirely up to you it's not quite as unstable as developer previews so you should be able to get it through just fine but it is still a beta so you shouldn't expect flawless performance just yet if that's a risk you're willing to take then by all means have fun oh and one last thing the easter egg for android 12 hasn't been revealed yet this beta at least on my pixel 4 here still has the android 11 easter egg i guess we'll have to learn more about that one at a later date and that about does it for this one folks if you want to learn more i encourage you to check out all of the videos and articles linked in the video description below especially luke's excellent overview of the google i o keynote as always thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful dayhello again ladies and gentlemen i'm joe handy from android authority and today we're going to talk about the first android 12 beta release and this one came with a little bit of a surprise oh and before we start let's learn what the s in android s stands for so we have this letter associated with the release and every year the question is what does that letter stand for and i'm here to tell you we are here to tell you that it stands for android 12. i'm sorry we're engineers we deal with numbers and we better get used to it all right fair enough chet let's get started that's right folks this year we're getting the redesign that a lot of us have been asking for the last major redesign was in 2014 with the birth of material design so it's been a few years since we've seen something different the new design is called material u which tells us that it's actually a branch off of material design instead of its own brand new thing for the new design google wanted to go with something that adapts to the user as they use the device in a way that google says makes the device feel more alive one of the examples they gave us was the lock screen if you pick up your phone the lock screen lights up from the bottom but if you hit the power button it lights up from the side instead this theme is apparent across the entire os there are little animations all over the place that make things feel a lot more reactive swiping notifications away on the lock screen causes the shapes to change and it works identically in the notification panel for some nice continuity these little touches feel less utilitarian and a little more fluid right down to the notifications showing up at the bottom of the screen instead of the top for people with tall devices it all actually looks pretty nice the next part we'll talk about is the quick settings the toggles are entirely gone and replaced with small cards you'll see fewer cards than you did toggles but each card is cleanly labeled easy to understand and contains more information than the toggle buttons did in previous versions of android the cards match the general shape of the media player from android 11 so everything blends together nicely you may also notice these little burst animations when you tap on the quick settings buttons this is also a new theming element that is actually present on most button presses across the os of course the settings menu got a redesign as well and yes it's reminiscent of samsung's one ui google wanted to focus on legibility so they tweaked the spacing and size of everything so it's easier to see and to read the overscroll looks similar but it was also rebuilt from the ground up if you scroll to the top you'll see large banner text so that people with large phones can hit the topmost options without readjusting the phones in their hands the other big thing google added was something they're calling color extraction basically you set a wallpaper and the os identifies the prominent and complementary colors it then uses those colors to auto theme various parts of the os such as the volume rocker quick settings regular settings widgets and even places like the keyboard and stock messaging app we're sure this will reach other apps as well as developers start to adopt it most of this takes place in the wallpaper and style screen that you can access by long pressing the home screen it shows you the colors it extracts from the wallpaper after you choose one of course you can override the color extraction feature and choose the colors you want as well yes friends it only took 14 years but we have proper if somewhat basic theming in stock android i don't know about you but that makes me a happy camper unfortunately the theming engine isn't live in the beta but it should be in a future release some other changes include more streamlined widgets a revamped pin entry screen on the lock screen a wider color palette used by the os new app splash screens and launch animations and a whole lot more i refer you to the articles and videos in the description for more details google announced and talked about some of the new android 12 features this year google i o so let's dig into those a little bit one of the new features discussed at google i o is the ability to use a long press of the power button to summon google assistant this is very reminiscent of bixby on older samsung devices but assistant is kind of better so we don't think as many people will mind this is available under the gesture portion of the settings menu of course a lot of the elements of the power menu such as controlling your house lights or activating google pay has been relegated to the quick settings menu so you still have quick access to all of those things google also mentioned their competing service with apple's car key the digital car key feature is baked into the os just like apple's car key it'll use nfc to unlock your car and you can share your digital key with a friend if needed this feature will roll out slowly to google pixel and samsung galaxy smartphones later this year finally we'll talk briefly about the baked in android tv remote in android 12. it's really a small thing but it lets you connect to your android tv in the event that you lose your remote and control things directly from your phone it doesn't seem like they added a lot of new features in the beta release but do check out our previous video on android 12 for the other features that they were already working on such as haptic feedback paired with audio gesture control tweaks and some other stuff so after the google i o keynote there was actually a second keynote for android developers specifically that outlines some of the under the hood changes i'll briefly touch on some of the stuff they talked about but most of it like the avif support is in our previous android 12 video so we'll only mention the new stuff in this video some of the improvements under the hood are coming to picture-in-picture mode specifically the animation of actually getting content from full view to the smaller window this is something we'll have to wait for developers to include before we can see it in action but it seems like it's going to be a positive change another new feature is the ability to natively blur content it's actually an old feature that dates back to the first version of android but developers will be able to blur content now that phones have powerful enough processors to do it quickly without issue one thing the developers talked about was the ability to transcode video from formats an app doesn't support 2h.264 which most apps do support this is an api level change that developers can use it isn't the biggest problem but it helps consolidate all of the various formats into a single one for developers who can't add support for everything the android clipboard is also getting just a little bit of a revamp the google engineers want users to know when an application is asking for clipboard data and a beautiful toast message will pop up letting you know that an application is accessing said clipboard data of course there are some other smaller things as well check out the android developers keynote linked in the video description below for more details it's only about 29 minutes long and it has way more info some of the biggest announcements today came in the form of privacy and security to start google now includes a privacy dashboard in android 12 it gives you a clean and quick overview of which app's accessed your information and how many times for instance every time google maps uses your location it'll show up here for you to review the dashboard also gives you information on how your data was used for instance it'll tell you if a permission was used in the background and in some cases how long an application used a particular permission it should work with every application on your device even the stock ones there is a shortcut to the permission manager in case you become concerned and want to revoke a permission another useful feature is the new mic and camera indicators these indicators appear when an application actually turns your mic and camera on and remains there until they turn off mic in camera use is a long-standing concern of many privacy-minded folks so hopefully this helps you can tap the indicator at any time to find out which applications are actually using your micro camera at that moment and there is a quick settings button to revoke mic and camera permissions for the whole phone this wasn't available in the beta and neither was the privacy dashboard but we do know that it's coming another security feature is the addition of approximate locations when you grant location permission you can choose to grant a precise location like you would for navigation or approximate location for applications that don't need to know exactly where you are thus you can give something like a weather application approximate location since that's all it really needs finally google is improving and enhancing its android private compute core this is the function that lets things like live captions and auto replies work on your phone the enhancements allow it to work without access to any network further increasing privacy plus it's entirely open source so the privacy community can comb through it and see for themselves as usual you can check out our previous android 12 video if you want to see the rest of the new privacy features after reading through the press briefing it seems google wanted everybody to know that the purpose of this redesign was to create something that is clean cohesive and consistent the ability to scroll down and see more information across all os level apps and menus the better spacing the higher legibility it all adds up to an easier to use operating system that actually flows nicely everything that moves gotta refresh and now everything moves the same the redesign doesn't change the look of things so much as it glues almost all the existing elements together it's like material design in its full final form some may be disappointed to see that the redesign doesn't change everything but this is by far the best material design has looked in a very long time the privacy features seem neat and it's good that google is finally giving people the power to monitor apps and services on their devices this functionality was only doable through apps for many many years little touches like the mic and camera indicators and the toggle that turns them off phone wide is long overdue and appreciated all in all this is a reasonably good update for privacy-minded people of course we'll have to wait for future betas and the potential future release to actually experience everything so i reserve at least some judgement until then however this is shaping up to be among the best android releases in recent memory that said whether or not you should install this and run it is entirely up to you it's not quite as unstable as developer previews so you should be able to get it through just fine but it is still a beta so you shouldn't expect flawless performance just yet if that's a risk you're willing to take then by all means have fun oh and one last thing the easter egg for android 12 hasn't been revealed yet this beta at least on my pixel 4 here still has the android 11 easter egg i guess we'll have to learn more about that one at a later date and that about does it for this one folks if you want to learn more i encourage you to check out all of the videos and articles linked in the video description below especially luke's excellent overview of the google i o keynote as always thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day\n"