Android 16’s First Public Beta Launches with iOS-Inspired Live Notifications
By Tilesh Boodhee | 12:00 AM PST · January 24, 2025
On Thursday, Google unveiled the first public beta of Android 16, following two developer beta releases last year. This new iteration introduces features reminiscent of iOS, such as live updates on the lock screen—similar to Live Activities on iOS. Noteworthy enhancements include the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec for superior video recording quality and a new framework that allows developers to optimize their apps for varying screen sizes and aspect ratios, ensuring a consistent experience across devices.
For users, the live updates will be a standout feature. Following Apple's lead with Live Activities in iOS 16, which showcased real-time updates like delivery status or sports scores, Android 16 will allow developers to integrate real-time notifications directly into the operating system.
Google is also enhancing app responsiveness. A new framework enables developers to optimize their applications for different screen sizes and aspect ratios, ensuring a consistent and visually appealing experience across a range of devices, from smartphones to tablets and foldables.
The inclusion of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec aims to elevate video quality. This codec supports high bitrates for video recording, reaching several gigabits per second across 2K, 4K, and 8K resolutions. This allows for faster editing and enables innovative features such as multi-view and auxiliary video options. APV delivers a quality that is "perceptually" lossless, approaching raw footage quality, making it competitive with Apple's ProRes and ProRes Raw formats.
Android 16 also offers new functionality for apps to recognize when to activate night mode in their cameras, improving low-light image quality. This feature was developed in collaboration with Instagram and is expected to enhance the experience for users of select devices.
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The update will also boost accessibility features. An indicator for mandatory fields within APIs will now notify users about required fields, improving the user experience and accessibility for all.
In a departure from the typical timeline, Google initiated the Android 16 developer preview in November instead of the usual early Q1 release. This strategy aims to enhance the Android update cycle, with the final version scheduled for Q2, allowing device manufacturers ample time to roll out updates and diminishing software fragmentation across devices. With these significant improvements, Android 16 promises to deliver a more seamless, personalized, and visually stunning user experience.
