On Google I / O 2022, company executives have outlined their vision for this year's major Android system update, which looks to continue many customization and privacy initiatives introduced by the search giant in Android 12 last year Its customizable material you color scheme will now be available as a preset theme and will also be expanded to cover third-party application icons and media players. New security features include a dedicated privacy and security menu.
For those who have been following the early beta version of Android 13, this direction is unlikely to be a big surprise. But today's announcement, which coincides with the search giant's annual Google I / O developer conference, shows that the company has formulated an overall vision for this year's major Android system updates. The search giant today released the second public beta of Android 13 to match these announcements.
After the customizable theme function of material you last year, Android can match its color scheme with your mobile phone wallpaper. This year, the media control module has also received an overhaul similar to the material you style, and will be able to extract colors from the album cover of the music being played. For those who don't want or need their phone theme to match the wallpaper exactly, another new feature is a range of preset color schemes to choose from.
The material you theme option will also appear on third-party application icons, which will appear in the first developer preview of Android 13 in February. "Samir Samat, Google's vice president of product management, explained:" in the last version, this was a missing part for us. I feel that everything in the system UI has been handled by beautiful material you except the icon. For us, we always feel that this is unfinished work. The new app icon theme option will first appear on the pixel device and will only work for supported apps. "
The RCS support of Google information will also be significantly improved later this year. A beta version of end-to-end encryption will be launched for group chat. At present, this function is only available in one-to-one RCS chat in Google information. The search giant said the standard aims to become a successor to the now outdated SMS and MMS protocols, which have been provided to more than 500 million Google information users around the world.
As we can see from its beta, Android 13 is also imposing more restrictions on personal data and mobile phone functions that applications can use by default. Soon, the application will have to first ask for permission to send notifications, and there is a new photo selector that allows users to limit the photos and videos the application can access, rather than granting permission to view the entire database. The new permissions will also restrict application access to "photos and videos" or "music and audio" files, not all file types.
Later this year, a new security and privacy settings page will be added to centralize all key data privacy information in one place. It aims to encourage Android users to solve any possible security problems.
Android 13 will allow users to set the language on a per app basis
In addition to the Android phone itself, Google is also emphasizing its work in interconnecting with other devices. It plans to add fast pairing support for the upcoming matter smart home standard this fall, so that you can quickly and easily add supported smart home devices to your network using Android phones. Support for the new power-saving Bluetooth Le audio standard is also about to appear in Android 13.
The last feature worth mentioning. Android 13 will allow users to set the system language on the basis of each application. Samart said this function is very helpful for multilingual users who rely on different languages in different situations. "If you're using a social media application, you might use one language. But if you're doing banking, you might use another language," he explained.
After the chaotic launch of Android 12 system, it may be gratifying to see that Google's focus this year is to improve rather than innovate the Android system. There is no large-scale direction change here, but a series of stable adjustments and improvements have been made to the existing measures of Android system.