The first developer preview version of Android 13 is now available and can be installed on a few select Pixel models. So that you don’t have to run the risk of throwing far too immature firmware onto your smartphone to find out what’s new to discover in Android 13, others have done it for you/us.
Among others, Mishaal Rahman, who is now well known to us here on the blog. We were already able to give you the first preview of a few innovations.
As one of the other innovations, Rahman also mentions a useful shortcut for quickly launching a QR code scanner, which can be found in the quick settings tiles.
It can be assumed that this tile will then directly open the corresponding QR function of Google Lens. But more tiles will soon be used here. For example, to activate Android’s one-handed mode and a tile for color correction. Android 13 should also have a new function, which should automatically delete all caches from the system memory.
When creating a guest user in Android 13, the owner can choose which apps to install for the guest profile. However, no data is shared between the owner and guest profiles, which means the guest profile still needs to sign in to those apps if needed.
It will also be interesting for some people that there is a new option in the settings for the 3-button navigation (if you don’t use the swipe gestures) that can be used to deactivate the triggering of the Google Assistant when the home button is pressed and held.
Android 12’s privacy dashboard expands in the new Android 13 with the ability to view data for the last 7 days instead of just the last 24 hours. Google is known to be working on better addressing devices with large displays with Android 12L. According to Rahman, a so-called hub mode is already implemented in Android 13, but it is not yet working.
This is supposed to be a function with which dedicated apps can be selected, which should then work across profiles on a hub device (i.e. accessible to several users). Once an app is selected, multiple users can access it on the shared interface. However, the primary user can restrict which Wi-Fi access points the device must be connected to so that applications can be released. These networks are referred to as “trusted networks”.
The display for the media player has also been revised, but currently does not show any album covers, which will certainly change in the future. Mishaal Rahman’s contribution is much more extensive, but also describes all sorts of changes or innovations that are less relevant for the consumer than for a developer. If you are interested, take a look at his post linked above.