At Google I/O 2022, company executives have outlined its vision for this year’s major Android update, which looks set to continue many of the customization and privacy moves the search giant introduced with last year’s Android 12. Its customizable Material You color scheme will now be available as a preset theme, and it will also be expanded to cover third-party app icons and media players. New security features include a dedicated privacy and security menu.
For those who have been following the early betas of Android 13, this direction couldn’t have come as much of a surprise. But today’s announcement, which coincides with the search giant’s annual Google I/O developer conference, sees the company lay out an overarching vision for this year’s major Android update. The search giant released the second public beta of Android 13 today to accompany these announcements.
After last year’s Material You customizable theme feature, Android can already match its color scheme to your phone ‘s wallpaper. This year, the media control module also received a Material You-like overhaul, and will be able to extract color from the album art of the music being played. Another new feature for those who don’t want or need their phone’s theme to exactly match their wallpaper is a selection of preset color schemes.
The Material You theme option will also appear on third-party app icons, which were introduced in the first developer preview of Android 13 in February. “This was a missing piece for us in the last release,” explained Samir Samat, vice president of product management at Google. It feels like everything in the system UI is nicely handled by Material You except for the icons. For us, it always felt like unfinished business. The new app icon theme options will appear first on Pixel devices and only work with supported apps. ”
RCS support for Google Messages will also be significantly improved later this year, with a beta launch of end-to-end encryption for group chats, a feature currently only available in one-to-one RCS chats in Google Messages. The search giant said the standard was designed to be the successor to the now-obsolete text and multimedia messaging protocol, which is now available to more than 500 million Google Messages users around the world.
As we’ve seen from its beta, Android 13 is also putting more restrictions on the personal data and phone features that apps can use by default. Soon, apps will have to ask permission first to send notifications, and there’s a new photo picker that lets users limit the photos and videos apps can access, rather than granting permission to view their entire library. The new permissions will also restrict apps from accessing “photo and video” or “music and audio” files, but not all file types.
A new security and privacy settings page will be added later this year, bringing all key data privacy information in one place. It is designed to encourage Android users to address any security issues that may arise.
In addition to the Android phone itself, Google is also emphasizing the work it has done to interoperate with other devices. It plans to add support for fast pairing to the upcoming Matter smart home standard this fall, allowing you to quickly and easily add supported smart home devices to your network using an Android phone. Support for the new power-saving Bluetooth LE audio standard is also coming in Android 13.
One last feature worth mentioning. Android 13 will allow users to set the system language on a per-app basis, a feature Samat said is helpful for multilingual users who rely on different languages in different situations. “If you’re using a social media app, you might speak one language. But if you’re doing banking, you might speak another language,” he explained.
After the chaotic rollout of Android 12, it’s perhaps comforting to see that Google’s focus this year is on perfecting rather than revolutionizing Android. There’s no massive direction change here, just a steady stream of tweaks and improvements to Android’s existing initiatives.