Google’s vision for Android 13 is to offer more of everything

Google has outlined its vision for this year’s major Android update, which looks set to continue many of the search giant’s personalization and privacy initiatives. Android 12 last year. Its customizable material color schemes will now be available as preset themes and is also expanding to cover icons of third-party apps and media player. There are also new security features, including a custom privacy and security menu.

The trend is unlikely to surprise anyone who keeps up Android 13‘s in early time beta. But today’s announcements, coincide with the search giant’s annual announcement Google I/O . Developer ConferenceSee the company as they lay out their overall vision for this year’s major Android update. Today, the search giant is releasing the second beta of Android 13 to coincide with the announcements.

After last year’s customizable themes feature, Android can already match its color scheme to the color scheme of your phone’s background. This year, the media controls are also receiving a similar overhaul similar to Material You and will be able to extract colors from the album art of the music being played. Another new feature for those who don’t want or need their phone theme to perfectly match their wallpaper is a series of preset optional color schemes to choose from.

Material customization options are also coming to third-party app icons, featured in Android 13’s first developer preview in February. “This was a missing part for us in the last release,” explains Google Vice President of Product Management, Sameer Samat. “I felt like everything in the UI of the system got that nice material handling except for the icons. To us, it always felt like an unfinished business.” New app icon customization options will be available on Pixel devices first and will only work with supported apps.

google messages RCS support It’s also set to get a major improvement later this year with the beta launch of end-to-end encryption for group chats, a feature currently only available on individual RCS chats in Google Messages. The search giant says the standard, which aims to be a successor to legacy SMS and MMS protocols, is now available to more than 500 million Google Messages users worldwide.

As we saw from the beta, Android 13 also imposes more restrictions on personal data and phone feature apps can use them by default. Soon, apps will have to Ask permission to even send notifications Primarily, there’s also a new photo picker that lets you limit the photos and videos an app can access, instead of giving permission to see your entire library. The new permissions will also restrict apps from accessing “Photos and Videos” or “Music and Audio” files, rather than all types of files.

A new Security and Privacy Settings page is being added later this year to collect all your important data privacy information in one place. It is designed to encourage Android users to address any security issues that may arise.

Image: google

Aside from the Android phones themselves, Google also emphasizes the work it does on interconnection with other devices. Planning to add quick pairing support for inbox The importance of the smart home standard This fall to make using your Android phone quick and easy to add supported smart home devices to your network. Support for the new energy-efficient Bluetooth LE Audio standard is also on the way in Android 13.

One last feature worth mentioning: Android 13 will allow users to set system languages ​​on a per-app basis, a feature that Samat says is useful for multilingual users who rely on different languages ​​in different situations. “If you’re using a social media app, you might use one language. But if you’re in banking, you might use another.

distance A messy roll out for Android 12It may be reassuring to see that this year Google’s focus is on improving Android rather than revolutionizing it. There is no massive change of direction here, just a steady series of tweaks and improvements to existing Android initiatives.