New Android 12 Update - What to Expect?

Last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we missed out on the Google I/O event as it was completely canceled by the company. But this year, Google has made up for it with an all-virtual I/O available to stream live for free.

Source: Google

One of the major highlights of this keynote was the Android12 update, which will be launched later this year. This much-awaited upgrade has 3 big changes over its previous Android 11. The first one is the new user interface, called Material You, that will help you to have a deeply personalized smartphone. The new upgrade of the android will bring a completely custom palette by using your background and your wallpaper. It will notice the background’s main color and the subtle tones and hues to make your smartphone’s theme match with it.

Source: Google

Along with that, the notification panel will also undergo a not-so-subtle change. You will get an updated quick settings menu with new toggles, for example, you can toggle off your camera and microphone usage from the notification bar for ALL applications at the same time.

Source: Google

The notifications will be better manageable with the option to snooze them. In the Beta version, we saw notifications with rounded app icons in the left corner of the notifications. Even the brightness bar and the volume control bars will be much thicker than before. Although I’m not sure that’s a better option, let's wait and see what Google exactly has in store for us.

Apart from these, the lock screen has some new updates. Whenever your notifications are all cleared, it will display a much bigger clock giving you the satisfaction that you are all caught up on your alerts.

The second major update to the Android 12 is the privacy of the smartphone. There are new privacy measures taken that help you control what you want to share with the apps installed on your phone. As mentioned earlier, you would be able to turn off the usage of the camera and microphone by all your apps with a single toggle. This is huge from a security standpoint. Even if you have given permission you will be able to close the tracking for all apps, even Google itself would not be able to use those aspects without permission. A privacy dashboard is there through which you can directly view which application on your phone has been using your camera, microphone and your location among other things and for how long it has been doing so. You can directly control what permissions you want to give the apps from this dashboard, which makes our work easier to an extent.

Source: Google

There is a new privacy compute core, which is open source, that is, any security panel can view and inspect all the elements of the core. Some other minor updates to the privacy of smartphones is that you will get a small indication on the right corner of the top of your screen whenever an app is using your camera or microphone, giving you much-needed information, and if you do not wish to share those, you can simply toggle them off, as we do in most of our online classes.

The third upgrade over the previous android 11 is the addition of several new features like scrolling screenshots, game booster to help you prioritize gaming and keeps all non-essential apps in the background, smart auto-rotate, app hibernation where the system forces stops the applications not used for a long period of time automatically,’ Now Playing’ which tells you what song is playing in your surroundings, ‘smart reply’ that will live you response suggestions based on your personal reply patterns.

Source: Google

Another amazing thing that Google is promising is that the new upgrade will reduce the CPU time of your phone by 22 percent! Your phone will be 22% faster with this new upgrade which is actually a pretty cool thing with all these fluent animations

The first look of this update will be visible in the new Google Pixel being launched later this year. Currently, the beta version can be installed in select Android phones though I would not suggest you to do this on your daily driver, as it can lead to several bugs and crashes. There are some features that were shown in the I/O keynote, which may not be accessible in the beta version, but will possibly be there in the actual update.

One thing is for sure, this new update looks quite promising to me. What do you think? Leave your views in the comments below.

To see the article for the entire keynote, click here.