Android 13 Preview 1 is out, with themed icons, privacy changes

On February 9, Google released the Android 12L Developer Preview #3, which is due for a final version in March. On February 10, Google is also releasing the Android 13 Developer Preview #1, which will hit devices sometime in the second half of the year. We now have Android developer previews for the next version of Android—and the version after that.

 

So what's new in Android 13? A few leaks have already detailed more Material You color options, a new notification opt-in system for users (both still unconfirmed), and per-all language preferences (now confirmed!). Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that Google is willing to disclose at this early stage.

Themed icons graduate from beta

Android 12 included a "beta" option for "themed icons," which monochromed some of Google's icon art and gave icons a round background that matches your Material You theme. The option pulled all the color out of an icon and reduced it to its shape.

 

We've never seen a fully working implementation of themed icons, though. Developers—if they are even willing to make themed icons—haven't been able to create them. The original themed icons in Android 12 were hard-coded, and Google never published documentation for the "beta" feature. For Android 13, developers now just need to supply "a monochromatic app icon and a tweak to the adaptive icon XML" and they'll be up and running with a themed icon.

 

It's still hard to tell if any of this "themed icon" stuff is a good idea. Nuking Google's icon colors is no big loss, since the latest rebrand makes them all the same rainbow color anyway. For third-party icons, which often have distinct, identifiable colors, won't this just make everything harder to find? It's also unclear how the icons will work in the real world.

 

Google got the idea for themed icons from the modding community's icon packs. But in an icon pack, a single designer makes a bunch of icons and a single user applies them. Google's rollout of themed icons won't work unless every developer in the world makes a themed icon, and it's hard to see that happening. The modding community also doesn't care about a company's branding priorities and just wants everything to match, while I can't imagine Facebook approving a Facebook icon that isn't blue.

Share pictures without the storage permission

Android 13 has a new built-in photo picker, replacing the file manager that used to pop up for picking photos. The goal here isn't for the photo picker to look or work differently from the file manager; instead, it allows you to send an app a single photo without granting that app access to the storage permission. Google explains that "Android’s longstanding document picker allows a user to share specific documents of any type with an app without that app needing permission to view all media files on the device. The photo picker extends this capability with a dedicated experience for picking photos and videos."

 

An app that doesn't have storage access can call up the system document picker (which has storage access), and the picker can forward access to the single file you've selected. It sounds like the photo picker will provide the same thing for photos. Google says this feature will require new "photo picker APIs," which an app would need to support. I imagine this system being great for things like messaging apps that want to share a picture or an app that just needs a profile icon.

 

Interestingly, Google wants to roll this feature out to older Android versions via a Project Mainline update. Project Mainline (or "Google Play System updates," as they have been rebranded) is a major Android project that makes the core components of the OS updatable via the Play Store, even if they need deep system permissions that make them unsuitable for the app permissions model. MediaProvidor was added as a Mainline module in Android 11, and Google wants to update it with the new photo picker, which is a system-level interface.

 

Speaking of everyone's favorite Android modularity project, Google promises that there will be more Project Mainline modules in Android 13, including modules for Bluetooth and Ultra wideband. Bluetooth is a notoriously messy standard, and devices of wildly varying ages and versions all need to talk to each other. Being able to band-aid this awful standard together via the Play Store will be nice. The Android Team is presumably still working on a big Bluetooth revamp codenamed "Gabeldorsche," which still hasn't hit the streets yet. Being able to update that remotely, if it ever ships, would be nice, too.

Connect to Wi-Fi without the location permission

Another feature that apps occasionally need is a list of nearby Wi-Fi devices, but that list comes attached to a more sensitive permission: location. Google keeps a huge, crowdsourced database of the location of every SSID on earth, and that means accessing a list of nearby Wi-Fi access points that know your location. So on Android, accessing the list of Wi-Fi hotspots means granting the "location" permission.

 

In Android 13, Google has cooked up a new "NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES" permission, which will presumably give apps a list of nearby devices without leaking your location or needing the location permission. This change will be great for setting up apps for some piece of Wi-Fi hardware like a robovac or smart speaker.

Faster text hyphenation—I swear, this is less boring than it sounds

One of the highlighted features is "Faster hyphenation," which sounds like one of the most boring possible OS updates. It's actually a big deal, though. Displaying text is one of the most common tasks on Android, but it's also one of the most expensive, thanks to it requiring a ton of measurement and layout work. A 2018 Google blog post once described the process for Android 9:

 

Displaying text can be complex, encompassing features like multiple fonts, line spacing, letter spacing, text direction, line breaking, hyphenation, and more. TextView has to do a lot of work to measure and lay out the given text: reading the font file, finding a glyph, deciding the shape, measuring the bounding box, and caching the word in an internal word cache. What's more, all of this work takes place on the UI thread, where it could potentially cause your app to drop frames.

 

Doing all this on the UI thread is bad for app performance since any hangups will make your app stutter. Furthermore, hyphenation is one of the most expensive text layout operations, because every syllable breakpoint for every word needs to be calculated to do a layout.

 

Google actually flipped hyphenation to "off by default" in Android 10, saying, "Our performance tests showed that when hyphenation is enabled, up to 70% of the time spent on measuring text is on hyphenation." For Android 13, Google now has a new hyphenation method it says is "as much as 200%" faster, and the system now has "almost no impact on rendering performance." Google does not explain how this works in the initial blog post.

The release timeline: Earlier API stability than normal

We are definitely facing a weird Android release schedule this year, with Android 12L due out in Q2 and this Android 13 release due out later in the year. Google's official Android 13 timeline shows the update hitting "Platform Stability" in June, which would be two months earlier than Android 12. The timeline also lists a final release sometime after July, which is also early. Is this a smaller release?

 

Google has system images up for the Pixel 4, 4a, 5, 5a, and 6. Missing this year is the Pixel 3a, which is due to lose support in May 2022 and therefore won't see this release.

 

Google says it does these early releases to gather feedback, so let the company have it!