The next version of Android remains in a don’t-try-this-at-home stage, but the arrival Thursday of a beta release of Android 15 does mark a notable step forward in that edition’s development.
A post by engineering VP Dave Burke leads off with a description of an app-layout tweak that may make your phone’s screen seem a little larger: Android 15 will automatically support “edge-to-edge” display for an app that will have its content flow under transparent renditions of the system’s status bar at the top and navigation bar at the bottom.
Another change in how Android deals with apps may ease life for people using alternate app stores on phones running low on storage. Android 15 will bring the app-archiving feature that Google introduced for apps hosted on its Google Play store last year to third-party app stores–an issue that European regulators continue to investigate.
A third app-support revision expands Android’s accessibility support to help apps using the TalkBack screen-reader feature to connect to Braille displays.
And among other updates, Burke’s post cites two noteworthy security features: operating system-level support for storing the cryptographic public keys of contacts that enable end-to-end encrypted communications with them, plus “additional changes to prevent malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground, elevating their privileges, and abusing user interaction.”
This beta release follows Google’s shipment of a developer preview of Android 15 in February that focused on privacy and security, followed by a second developer preview in March that revealed new satellite-roaming and PDF-display features.
Unlike those prior releases, which only supported installation on Google’s newer Pixel devices, the beta should work on any Pixel enrolled in Google’s Android beta program. Google’s timeline for Android 15 predicts a beta 2 release in May (likely to coincide with its I/O developer conference), “platform stability” with a beta 3 release in June, followed by a consumer release in late summer or early fall.