Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 15: SATELLITE messaging confirmed!”.
I have Android 15 developer Preview 2 installed here on my pixel 6 and I’m ready to tell you everything you need to know about this latest version of Android. Last month we told you all about the first Android 15 developer preview and covered a lot of the new features that are in there. If you haven’t seen that be sure to check that out, because there’s a lot of cool stuff that we covered and I’m not going to talk about that stuff again here. So if you need to catch up, be sure to do that, also keep keep in mind. As before that this is a developer preview as such, it is designed for developers only.
We strongly recommend not installing this on your personal pixel device, if you have one because you’re going to face bugs and other problems as such. These features that I’m going to cover are primarily going to be geared towards developers and not users, but there are a few cool things here that you’re going to be excited about so stay tuned. For that, the most exciting new feature in Android 15 developer Preview 2 is the introduction of satellite messaging. Google has a vision here in two respects.
The first is going to be a duplication of what we saw with Apple’s emergency, SOS feature which came out around 2 years ago. This allows you to connect to satellites and message with emergency transponders. If you are in an emergency, it allows you to do this from anywhere in the world with or without cellular connectivity. You can do this as long as you have open view of the sky, so you could be out in the woods you could be in the desert.
You could be on a mountain. You could be anywhere without cell phone connectivity and still connect with emergency services. In case you need it, but Google is also introducing a secondary system for satellite messaging in Android 15, which would allow for you to use satellites just for any text messages.
We know that starlink and T-Mobile have a partnership together to offer this, and it looks like Google is going to incorporate this directly into Android 15. Obviously, this would be something you would need to pay for, probably directly to T-Mobile or whichever carriers support it. But it would be really cool to be able to use satellite connectivity on your Android phone and message people just for fun, while you’re out away from cellular connectivity.
Another cool new feature coming to the second Android 15 developer preview involves screen, recording if you’ll remember in Android 15 developer preview 1. We told you about how screen recording can now only record one app instead of your entire display. This is a good privacy feature because it prevents people from able to see your status bar the notification icons that are there and any notifications that happen to come in while you’re doing that screen recording with Android 15 developer Preview 2. Google is taking this a step.
Further by allowing developers to completely block their apps from screen recordings, in other words, if you try to initiate a screen recording over certain apps you’ll, just get a blank screen. This could be a good thing for things like banking apps, where you don’t want anyone to be able to record a screen recording, but it also could be annoying if there’s an app that you do want to do. A screen recording on and the developer has blocked that ability we’re going to have to wait and see how this one pans out, but this could be good for people who are really concerned about the privacy of their Android phone. This next feature may seem like a small one, but it could make a huge difference for your day-to-day usage of your phone. Google understands that there’s a big problem with loudness normalization.
What that means is is when you’re, using one app and listening to it and then move to a different app and listening to that one. Sometimes the volume can be wildly different, causing you to need to either turn up or turn down your Android phone as you switch from app to app Google understands this is a problem and is working to fix it by introducing some loudness normalization features within Android. This will allow developers to tap into the standard and make sure that their app stay at the same level as other apps. Obviously, this will take quite a bit of time for it to become a normal thing, because all these Developers for all the apps that you use will have to adopt this. But it’s great to see Google taking this step, it’s going to make things way better for people who use headphones with their Android phone most of the time. If you’re like me, you faced a lot of problems using your Android phone to pay for things at stores. You put your phone down on the payment terminal and you get an alert back saying that it can’t be processed, usually forcing you to then put your finger on the fingerprint sensor or use face ID to log into the phone again, even even though you’re already logged In this is a problem that Google is ready to address with this new Android 15 developer preview. To essentially, what Google is doing is introducing a new API that will listen for NFC contacts, but not actually act upon them. This could make it so that, when you put down your phone for the first time on a new terminal, while you’re actually unlocked, it will work the first time.
I’M really excited about this one. I hope it works as well as Google is saying it will. Those are the major new developments in Android 15 developer Preview.
2. There are some smaller miscellaneous ones that involve things like HDR and PDFs, but we can describe those for you better in the link in the description so be sure to check that out also stay tuned, because just because Google has told us about these features for Android 15 developer Preview 2 doesn’t mean that these are the only features in there over the next few days. We’Ll probably find a lot more going on that Google hasn’t told us about so stay tuned because we’re going to cover those right here at the Android authority. You you Channel until then, we will see you in the next article .