Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 12 – Everything you need to know”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, i’m joe handy from android authority.com. After nearly eight months of android, 12 developer, previews and betas, we now get to see it in all of its glory. It’S the biggest update we’ve had in years. So, let’s not waste any time and get right into it. One of the biggest parts of android 12 is the new design. The last big redesign was the switch to material design back in 2014, and google is keeping the material design, basics and adding a bunch of other stuff to present what they call material you. Thus, it is a branch off of material design and not necessarily its own thing.
That fact is readily evident in that the usual stuff is still there, where we left android 11., your home screen, quick settings and the actual settings still behave the same way they did before and there is no real difference in functionality. However, the way they look was revamped pretty heavily in android 12.. Let’S start with the home screen, you can now set a wallpaper in android 12 themes. Your entire experience around that wallpaper. There is a mechanism to override that color with one of your choosing. So you could basically theme android 12, how you want the theme permeates across the os, including quick settings, regular settings dialer any app with material you support and even the easter egg.
It even works with some widgets. As you can see here, i’m moving the clock widget from the blue sky to the brown ground and back again and the clock hands change, colors based on the wallpaper behind it. The wallpaper and style section was redesigned, so you can access and customize these changes. So you’ll no doubt notice that as well. You can see the colors android extracted from your wallpaper, as well as the options to override those colors. This is real theming and it took almost 14 years, but i am absolutely stoked that it now exists on android natively.
Moving on the quick settings got a pretty big revamp as well. The buttons are larger, with a cleaner look and clearer verbiage for better control. I’Ve heard mixed reactions to the new layout.
On the one hand, the new toggles are much easier to read, but the larger size means fewer, toggles per page, a detriment to people who use a lot of toggles. You may like them. You may not it’s all up to personal preference.
Most of the toggles function the same way, so the change is mostly aesthetic, but some like the internet toggle do act a little bit differently. There are also a few new quick settings, toggles for alarms, mic and camera access and some other stuff which we’ll talk about later, along with things like google pay. Some of these changes were made to clean up the power menu, which is once again just a power menu with a 911 emergency shortcut. Let’S take a look at the settings menu.
Next google called this redesigned silky home in the developer previews, and it’s now a full feature. It introduces a cleaner, more minimal, look with larger headers, similar to samsung’s one ui. The large headers make reaching the settings at the top of the list easier one-handed when using larger devices. There were some other minor changes in the settings as well. For instance, the safety and emergency section is on the main list.
Instead of tucked away somewhere else in the settings, there were some things that got shuffled around, but this video is going to be long enough as it is. The redesign is nice and like the quick settings, it is also themed based on your material. You theme now, let’s talk about the final part of this redesign.
Google says that they wanted to make the os feel more alive and reactive. They do this with a host of subtle tweaks all over the place. It starts with the lock screen the os now lights, up from different directions, depending on how you unlock your phone.
If you use the pickup to wake up function, it lights up from the bottom and the power button makes it light up starting at the power button. There is also a new charging animation that looks quite nice. Other little things include a notification animation where the shapes change, when you start to swipe it away. It’S very subtle, but most button presses across the os, now have a little starburst animation as well. These little animations are present across the os and it really does make things feel more responsive. There were some other minor changes worth talking about.
The notifications look a little different than they did before, but function mostly the same. The half swipe to snooze mechanism is now gone, and you must long press to do things like silence the notification. The media player in the quick settings looks a bit different, but nothing serious.
They always on display looks a little bit different as well, and it also themes based on your theme. Also when the clock is big, you have no notifications and when it’s small, the clock moves up to the top left corner. So that’s a neat little visual way to tell if you have something you need to look at. I’Ve probably forgotten a few minor changes like the redesigned pen pad and the redesigned widget selector.
But this is the longest design section i’ve ever written for an android os video. So leave a comment if i forgot something to help out your fellow viewers. I covered the big stuff and it would take another five minutes to cover the rest of the minor stuff. As i said earlier, the revamp was absolutely massive and a long time coming, those looking for a fresh redesign definitely got their wishes this year, android 12 doesn’t have any super massive new features, but again google pulled out all of the stops this year and there are A lot more than usual for an android os upgrade to start android 12 introduces no joke scrolling screenshots, you can access the feature by taking a normal screenshot and then tapping the capture more button.
The os then scrolls and screenshots until it has the entire page, the edit section of the screenshot ui, also got some additions like the ability to add text. The whole thing feels way better than it did last year. You can now use google assistant by long pressing. The power button – it’s a setting you have to enable under the settings, then system, then gestures and you can find it in there after enabling it the power button.
Summons google assistant much like how samsung phones summoned bixby a couple of years ago and the usual power menu is accessible by pressing the volume up and power button. At the same time, android can now use your face to detect when to auto rotate. This is an optional thing in the settings in case you don’t want android looking at your face. Basically, the phone looks at your head and sees how it’s oriented in relation to the phone and then rotates accordingly. Thus, you can do things like lay down on your side in bed and the phone stays in portrait mode.
It worked okay in testing and i didn’t have any problems with it. Those were these super big features, but there were a bunch of smaller ones that you may or may not use. For instance, there is a remote feature for android tv baked right into android 12.. Additionally, there is a car key feature similar to apple’s with nfc and uwb support. It should roll out 2 pixel and samsung phones. Later this fall moving on. There is a phone hub on chrome os to let you view your phone status straight from your chromebook.
You can also share your wi-fi credentials with a friend using nearby share directly from the menu instead of just using the qr code. There is a one-handed mode that you can access from the settings that shrinks everything down to half for easier use on taller phones, select, pixel phones will have a quick tap feature that will let you perform simple commands or open apps by double tapping. The back of the phone, my phone didn’t, have this capability, so i can’t really show it off, but what i can show you is the new audio source selector in the media player in the quick settings. This new button lets you choose between your phone speaker and any audio device. You have connected, it’s actually pretty helpful and we hope that stays for a good long time. Some other minor improvements include nearly 1 000 new emoji the ability to copy and paste things like images from one app to another and a dim mode in the accessibility settings that lets.
You dim your screen beyond what you normally can. Google also tweaked the gesture controls to work better in immersive mode. There is also an overview suggestions function that will suggest things like copying: a link directly from your recent apps menu, making the recent apps menu slightly more useful.
There are probably some other minor features that i didn’t include and i’ve linked up google’s official android 12 page in the description. If you need it, google made a lot of changes under the hood in android 12, which is pretty par for the course when it comes to os updates. So let’s get right into it.
To start, google added a new haptic feedback feature that syncs with audio cues. The most common and easy to understand example of this is when playing video games on console games. Your controller might vibrate when you’re near an explosion. Android 12 will allow developers to do this same kind of thing on their mobile games.
There are non-gaming uses for it. As well that we might see, as time goes on, google also improved the widgets api to encourage developers to update and create better widgets. An example of this in action is the aforementioned clock widget that changes colors based on the wallpaper behind it. Some other new features include improved pressable buttons, better personalization and smoother transitions.
Along with the new theming stuff, google wants apps and android to be more responsive and to work better. One of those changes includes a splash screen with sexier animations to alleviate animation lag when opening apps. Additionally, there were big changes made to the notification apis to allow apps to open, faster and smoother when directly opening from a notification. I’M simplifying things, because the technical jargon is mostly for developers, but suffice it to say that google doesn’t want any more jank when opening applications and has put forth many api improvements in order to solve the issue.
Picture in picture mode also got some improvements, including smoother transitions into picture-in-picture mode, along with some better controls, depending on the content, google also added a new game mode api that allows developers to create more robust options when it comes to gaming performance. The example google gives is the ability to drop a game into battery saving mode where the graphics and frame rates are reduced, so your device can game longer. We expect this one in a lot of games over the next few years.
Android 12 also introduces the app hibernation function. Basically after you don’t use an application for so long. Your phone strips it of all of its permissions and puts it to sleep samsung’s, one ui has had a similar feature for years and it’s one of my favorites.
So i’m glad android 12 also has it. There were a bunch of smaller things as well. For instance, android 12 has a transcoding layer, so applications that don’t natively support hevc can still function by letting the os handle. The video on its behalf.
Android 12 also supports avif images which promises higher quality at a lower file size than jpeg. One of the larger under the hood changes is app search. Basically, this api lets developers index the information within their applications with android 12. people using the device search from the app drawer will be able to search for things in applications without actually having to open them.
You’Ll see this one later on when developers support it better, but it is a really neat thing. Some other under the hood changes include support for multi-channel audio up to 24 channels, backup and restore improvements, and a lot more. There is also better support for larger and weirdly shaped devices like foldable phones and televisions. Finally, google is adding even more modules to project mainline, so you get even more updates through the play store instead of over the air. There are more a lot more actually and we’ll link up the official android 12 developer page in the video description. If you want to see more security and privacy once again didn’t see as big of a focus as it did in previous years, google seems to have shifted from lots of little changes to fewer, but more impactful changes.
Let’S dig right in the biggest one that everyone’s talking about is the microphone and camera indicators, these pop up in the top right corner of the screen whenever the camera and microphone are being accessed. The obvious benefit of those indicators is knowing when an application might be listening or watching you. It shouldn’t ever happen without you knowing it, but if it does, you’ll know that the application can’t be trusted. You can go a step further and use the quick settings toggles to disable the camera and microphone permissions entirely, so no applications can use them at all.
That’S a pretty neat security feature. The other big privacy feature this year is the privacy dashboard. This one is also pretty simple: it’s a literal dashboard that shows you which applications used, which permissions and when tapping at any category, shows you an easy to follow, timeline of which applications used the permission and when you can then quickly tap on the app and revoke The permission, if you don’t like the activity, android 12 also introduces the approximate location permission. This is a useful half step where applications can generally see where you are, but not the exact location that you would give say, a navigation app like google maps, an example where this is useful is a weather app where it needs to know what city you’re in, But doesn’t need to know your exact address.
Some other minor security features include better mac address restrictions, making the feature function on all applications, and not just some like last year, the android private compute core. The thing that keeps your machine learning and ai stuff away from everything else receives some updates and enhancements as well. There is a new bluetooth permission that lets apps scan for bluetooth devices without needing your location, permission, android 12, even limits the refresh rate of device. Sensors, of course, there are probably a couple dozen even smaller changes and improvements and i’ll link them up in the video description below at your convenience.
Oh god, zeus. That’S a lot to take in all at once, which leads me to my first conclusion: about android 12.: it’s the biggest android launch, we’ve seen since material design came out in 2014.. We are now officially in the material. U era and if i’m being honest, this is probably going to be the best era of android. Yet the thing that stuck out to me, while testing the betas over the months, was that this really felt like a single, cohesive vision. Most previous versions of android felt, like google, was just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and then putting out fires, refining features and just tacking on random new stuff.
As the years went on, most people are going to focus on the visual elements of android 12.. That’S only natural, it’s the easiest thing to talk about, and it’s also visually appealing. However, the visual parts of android 12, however awesome they are – are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The redesign changed a lot of stuff that then branch out into the various parts of the operating system. One such example is the quick settings toggles, they were redesigned for easier legibility and then google used them to place some of its most important android 12 features like the microphone and camera permission. Toggles, the team worked on making the whole os feel smoother by adding a bunch of animations and stuff, and then some of those animations, like the charging wave animation, changed colors. Based on your theme. They even encouraged developers to work on their widgets by making widgets a big part of the material you redesign.
The last time google made such large strides to improve android widgets was the android honeycomb update that made widgets resizable. In fact, almost everything in android 12 traces itself back to the base premise of material. U, which tells me that this isn’t just google making things look different. This is the future of android from the colors on your home screen to how smoothly apps open all the way down to whether or not those apps can use your microphone or your precise location.
It’S going to look different, but it’s also going to feel and behave differently as well. This is android now everything is different and there’s no going back for better or for worse. The video is officially over at this point, but as per tradition, i’m going to show you the android 12 easter egg. You can access it in the same way that you always did before by pressing the android version box in the settings.
It’S just the clock, widget and you can move the clock hands around the clock pulses whenever you reach the 12 o’clock position and the clock changes colors, based on your material. You theme it’s simpler than years past, but that’s okay, because the os as a whole was way more complicated and that about does it for this one folks, if you like this video, you know what to do and if not, you still know what to do. We have more resources linked up in the video description below if you want to learn more, as always, thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day.
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