Personalization is the core theme of the update—it is “designed for you”—and many of the new features are centered around providing a deeply personal experience to Android users. Some notable features are the redesigned systems spaces, a fully adaptable quick settings shade, and a user privacy dashboard. While not all of the new features have been revealed, and there may be dozens more, these are the ten best we’ll see in Android 12. The result is a more expressive, dynamic, and personalized system. From more fluid animations to redesigned system spaces, Android has never looked or felt so good, emphasizing usability. The notification shade, volume controls, widgets, lock screen, and menus all change to match the primary color. Set a red wallpaper, and you’ll see red everywhere. How cool is that? Tiles work like icons. A quick tap enables or disables functions, and a long press takes you to the related settings page. However, the tiles are bigger, so they can reveal more information. For icons that only show the title or name, the tiles will include more, like a list of WiFi networks available, nearby Bluetooth devices, and so on. The larger size means you see fewer options in the quick settings panel, only four tiles at a time. You can customize the order and place the most critical tiles first. They also follow color extraction settings. New indicators will also appear in the status bar to let you know when apps use your device’s microphone or camera. There are new toggles in the quick settings to disable these sensors altogether. Approximate location sharing is now offered to prevent apps from grabbing your exact location or address. There’s also more transparency about collected data and how it’s being used. In short, it improves the local processing power of devices for privacy and security functions. Google is doing away with “trampolines.” Trampolines are notifications that take a long time to load the resulting application, even after tapping them. Instead, they will take you to an app in seconds. This change will break some apps, like Pushbullet, which sends notifications that don’t link to anything. After turning on the mode in settings, you can enable it by swiping down from anywhere at the bottom of the screen. Content at the top half of the screen will drop down, giving you better access to on-screen elements, like buttons and menus. This update will significantly impact hotfixes and security patches, which can be pushed directly through the Play Store instead of waiting weeks or months for a traditional OTA update. There are also new paintbrush and markup tools so you can add notations, Emojis, stickers, and other doodles to your screenshots. Samsung devices already include this, namely the Note lineup, but it’s nice to see in native Android, too. There’s no official list of all the new widgets being added, even with the Beta available, but they are coming. To list a few: We may get AVIF image support, multi-channel audio with support for up to 24 channels, rich media content through the clipboard, optimizations for large display devices like tablets, and more.
