Yesterday the Google team released the long-awaited first beta version of Android 13 for google pixel series smartphones, thus entering a new phase of development of this operating system, which should be ready for all users in the third quarter of 2022.
However, the Mountain View giant makes available to all interested parties the appropriate generic system images (or GSI) of the beta build of Android 13, thus giving the possibility to owners of many non-Google Pixel devices (or unsupported Pixels) to test this release.
Android 13 beta generic system images available
Specifically, there are four experimental builds that support x86_64 or ARM64 architectures and the option to include or exclude google mobile services suite apps.
Interested users can download them from the Android developer site and upload them to an Android 9 device (API level 28) or later that is fully compatible with Project Treble and has the bootloader unlocked. The Google team is keen to point out that these generic system images have three serious bugs:
- When using the built-in dialer, you may not hear any audio on your phone (this is due to a change in the installation location of the phone service in Android 10)
- Restarting Android 13 GSI may fail on some devices and to get around the problem you can restart the device in recovery mode, erase user data, perform a factory reset and then proceed to restart
- The size of the gsi + gms file (images named _gsi\_gms\_arm64-*_) may be larger than the size of the default dynamic system partition on the device (to work around this issue you can delete some non-essential dynamic partitions and flash the generic system image again)
These images are almost identical to those made for the Google Pixel currently supported by the Mountain View giant.