After many months of developer previews and beta releases, Android 15 is now formally accessible.
It’ll begin rolling out to supported Pixel units within the subsequent few weeks, and within the subsequent few months, units from Samsung, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo and Xiaomi will get it.
It provides a number of updates that customers will have the ability to make the most of, akin to the truth that the TalkBack display reader is now powered by Gemini, Chrome can now learn internet pages aloud, and the Earthquake Alerts System — which makes use of crowdsourced earthquake detection expertise to inform of earthquakes earlier than they begin — is rolling out to all U.S. states and 6 territories.
As with each Android replace, there are numerous modifications builders will want to concentrate on. This time, the principle updates for builders could be divided into 4 classes: typography and internationalization, digital camera and media experiences, person expertise, and privateness and safety.
“Android 15 continues our mission of constructing a personal and safe platform that helps enhance your productiveness whereas supplying you with new capabilities to supply lovely apps, superior media and digital camera experiences, and an intuitive person expertise, notably on tablets and foldables,” Matthew McCullough, VP of product for Android Developer, wrote in a weblog publish.
Typography and internationalization
FontFamily cases can now be created from variable fonts with out having to specify the wght and ital axes, and the textual content renderer will routinely modify these values to match the airing textual content.
NotoSansCJK, which is the font file for Chinese language, Japanese, and Korean, can be now a variable font, which the Android crew says creates new alternatives for artistic typography.
The Japanese Hiragana, or Hentaigana, font is now bundled by default, helpful for art work and design, but in addition in sharing and preserving historic Japanese paperwork.
And at last, there may be improved justification for languages which use white house to section characters, like Chinese language and Japanese.
Digital camera and media
For screens that help each HDR and SDR, setDesiredHdrHeadroom can be utilized to set the HDR headroom, which may forestall SDR content material from displaying as washed out.
Android 15 additionally helps clever adjustment of audio quantity and dynamic vary compression for apps with AAC audio content material and loudness metadata. This enables quantity to be adjusted based mostly on person units and environment, the Android crew defined.
Different updates on this space embrace Low Gentle Enhance to regulate the publicity of the Preview stream in low-light circumstances, larger management of flash depth in SINGLE and TORCH modes, and help for digital MIDI 2.0 units as in the event that they have been a USB MIDI 2.0 machine.
Person expertise
To enhance multitasking, customers can now save their split-screen app mixtures and likewise pin the taskbar.
Moreover, apps that focus on SDK 35 will show edge-to-edge by default. System bars might be clear or translucent, and content material is drawn behind.
Privateness and safety
Customers can now create a personal house the place they’ll disguise sure apps, requiring authentication to entry them.
Android 15 additionally provides help for utilizing passkeys to sign-on and helps autofilling saved credentials into related enter fields.
Additionally, apps can now detect if they’re being recorded, which permits apps to inform the person if that is taking place whereas they’re performing a delicate process.
Moreover, the brand new allowCrossUidActivitySwiftFromBelow attribute prevents process hijacking assaults by blocking apps from launching actions in the event that they don’t match the highest UID on the stack.
And at last, PendingIntent creators now block background exercise launches by default, which prevents apps from by chance creating ones that could possibly be utilized by malicious actors
Different developer expertise updates throughout Android Studio, Jetpack Compose, and Android Jetpack libraries
The ApplicationStartInfo API supplies perception into the rationale an app is beginning, time spent in launch phases, begin temperature, and extra.
The profiling class in Android Jetpack lets apps request heap profiles, heap dumps, stack samples, or system traces.
StorageStats.getAppBytesByDataType([type]) API offers insights into how an app is utilizing storage.
Different developer expertise updates embrace new PdfRenderer API capabilities, new OpenJDK APIs, new SQLite APIs, and new Canvas drawing capabilities.