The Android development team just released first beta version for Android 15allowing developers and early adopters to start using it on their supported Pixel devices.
As of this beta version, apps can now be displayed edge-to-edge by default, which means content will be visible behind system bars like the notification bar at the top or the navigation bar at the bottom. Previously, developers had to call a specific function to unlock this feature. To help developers make their apps work well edge-to-edge, there are many Material 3 composables that will now handle inlays for them.
This release also unlocks the ability to register your fingerprint for touch payment experiences. This will notify users of NFC application polling loop activity. Viewing changes first introduced in the second development preview have also been added to the NFC experience.
Another new feature is the ability to justify text based on letter spacing, which will be useful in languages that use spacing for segmentation, such as Chinese and Japanese.
Android 15 also introduces OS-level support for archiving and unarchiving apps, a feature introduced last year to save space by removing rarely used apps. Archived apps are still displayed in the launcher with an icon indicating that they need to be downloaded again.
Other new features in this Android 15 beta include:
- A ProfilingManager class that allows gathering information such as heap dumps, heap profiles and heap sampling
- Braille support in the TalkBack screen reader
- Key management for end-to-end encryption
- More features to prevent malicious background apps from pushing other apps to the foreground and elevating their privileges
“Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity, gives users a superior app experience, protects user privacy and security, and makes your app accessible to as many people as possible — all within a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of devices, silicon partners and carriers ,” Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android, wrote in the blog post.