Google’s second development preview for Android 15 has arrived, bringing long-awaited support for satellite connectivity along with several improvements to contactless payments, multilingual recognition, volume consistency and interaction with PDFs through apps.
These developer-focused betas are a testing ground for features that will likely make it a final public release scheduled for later this year. According to Google, public beta releases should be available for testing between April and July.
The latest developer preview addresses some annoyances and security issues faced by Android users, such as making apps aware of why some services may be unavailable when devices are using a satellite connection. This is also the first official confirmation that Android 15 will come with satellite messaging, with Google’s press release saying that the new preview includes support for “preloaded RCS apps to use the satellite connection to send and receive messages”.
Screen recording detection support is being introduced for apps that allow them to notify users if their activity is being recorded. The reliability of one-touch contactless payments is also improved for apps using NFC, and the multilingual audio recognition introduced in Android 14 is refined to avoid dropping words when the user switches languages.
Small screens on flip phones should also become more useful as developers get direct access to more ways to interact with them, while support for the new CTA-2075 volume standard should help Android users avoid inconsistent volume adjustments when switching between content. And finally, Google is making “significant improvements” to PDF features in apps, adding support for password-protected files, comments, form editing, search, and selection with copy.