The first Developer Preview of Android 13 Tiramisù has been available for a few weeks and, immediately after its release, a real hunt for the “hidden” news, contained within the source code of the next release of the green robot’s operating system, has begun.
The “discovery” we are talking about today comes from the XDA developer community and is related to plans for a feature planned for Android 13: it seems that Google has changed its plans in this regard. In fact, Big G may have shelved its plans to add support for another private DNS standard to Android 13, in addition to the currently supported DNS-over-TLS ( DoT ) standard.
Google shelves plan to add support for another private DNS standard in Android 13
Google had been working for some time to add native support for another private DNS standard to Android, and the first signs of this had been found in September 2021 in the AOSP code in which, a change to the code, indicated the addition of the native support for the DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) standard in Android 13.
According to further code changes discovered recently, it seems that this new standard will not be enabled by default in Android 13 Tiramisu but this does not necessarily mean that the DoH standard cannot be made native in subsequent software releases.
DoT and DoH are private DNS standards, used to encrypt communications between your device and the DNS (Domain Name Server), which perform the same functions: DoT uses the TLS (or SSL) protocol to directly encrypt communication with DNS, while DoH leverages HTTP or HTTP / 2 protocols to send questions and answers, rather than communicating directly over UDP. Without getting too specific, DoH should offer a slight edge over DoT from a privacy standpoint.
Unfortunately, therefore, it is possible that we will have to wait another year for Google to add native support for DoH in Android, and, perhaps, the future version 14 of the operating system could be the candidate to receive it.