Google has released the third Developer Preview for Android 12 weeks before the Android I/O. This comes after its first Android 12 preview release in February, and Developer Preview 2 in March. The update brings new app launch experience, new video and camera capabilities to help developers get more out of underlying hardware support, and a new permission for exact alarms to help users save battery.
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- Improved app launch experience – New app launch animation for all apps from the point of launch, a splash screen showing the app icon, and a transition to the app itself. Developers can customize it with custom icon or an animation, so apps can maintain their unique branding.
- New call notification template – Improved call notifications that gives them more visibility and scannability, and improve their consistency with other notification components.
- New permission for exact alarms – Apps targeting Android 12 that want to use exact alarms will now need to request a new permission from developers. Users get visibility over the apps that have this permission and letting them grant and revoke it from Special App Access Permissions in Settings.
- Improved web linking – Changes in default handling of links that aren’t verified through Android App Links or manually approved for links by the user. Now the OS will directly open them in the default browser, rather than showing a chooser dialog.
- Rich haptic experiences – New tools for creating informative haptic feedback for UI events, immersive and delightful effects for gaming, and attentional haptics for productivity. New expressive effects like low tick that take advantage of the broader frequency bandwidth of the latest actuators.
- Camera2 vendor extensions – Android 12 brings vendor extensions directly in the platform that helps apps that have complex Camera2 implementations such as bokeh, HDR, night mode, and others to take advantage of the extensions without having to make significant changes to legacy code instead of vendor extensions in CameraX library
- Quad bayer camera sensor support – New platform APIs let third-party apps take full advantage of Quad / Nona Bayer patterns to offer great flexibility in terms of image quality and low-light performance
- Faster machine learning – ML accelerators bring performance improvements that hafles inference call overhead by introducing improvements such as padding, sync fences and reusable execution objects. ML accelerator drivers are now updatable outside of platform releases, through Google Play services so that performance improvements and bug fixes reach users faster than ever before.
- More-flexible backup configurations – Updated XML configuration format for backup, so developers can now set different rules for cloud backups and device-to-device transfers.
Just as before, the Android 12 Developer Preview 3 can be flashed on to the Pixel 3/3 XL, Pixel 3a/3a XL, Pixel 4/4 XL, Pixel 4a/4a 5G and the Pixel 5. Users who are already running the first Developer Preview will receive the Developer Preview 3 as an OTA update.
The new preview will come in May, Beta releases after that before the stable update sometime in August or September. You can check out more details here.