Trust and safety

We’re continuing to focus on giving users more transparency and control while keeping their devices and data secure. In today’s release, we’ve added some new features to check out and test with your apps.

App overlay controls - Android’s system alert window gives apps a way to get users’ attention for important actions by showing an overlay on top of the active app. These windows can interrupt the user, though, so we already require apps torequest permission before displaying them. Now in Android 12 we’re giving you control over whether these overlays can be shown over your content. After you’ve declareda new permission, your app can callWindow#setHideOverlayWindows() to indicate that allTYPE_APPLICATION_OVERLAY windows should be hidden when your app’s window is visible. You might choose to do this when displaying sensitive screens, such as transaction confirmation flows. Morehere.

Extended security for lockscreen notification actions - Android 12 adds finer-grained privacy and security controls for notifications displayed on the device lockscreen. You can nowconfigure notification actions so that when triggered from the lockscreen, they will always generate an authentication challenge. This extends thenotification visibility controls already available through the notification APIs. For example, this enables a messaging app to require authentication before deleting a message or marking it as read. Morehere.

Better user experience tools

We’re working to give you more tools to help you deliver a polished experience and better performance for users. Here are some of the updates in today’s release.

Support for Rounded corners - Many modern devices use screens with rounded corners, giving them a clean modern look, but also introducing some extra considerations for app developers. To deliver a great UX on these devices, developers need to account for the rounded corners and adjust any nearby UI elements to prevent them from being truncated.

To help with this, we’re introducing new APIs to let you query for rounded corners and get their details. ARoundedCorner holds the details for a corner, including its radius, centerpoint, and other data. You can callDisplay.getRoundedCorner() to get the absolute details for each rounded corner. You can also callWindowInsets.getRoundedCorner() to get the corner details relative to your app’s bounds. With these, you can manage the position of UI elements and content as needed. Morehere.

Picture in Picture (PIP) improvements - for people using gesture nav, we’ve improved how apps transition to picture-in-picture (PIP) mode on swipe up-to-home. If an app enablesauto-PIP, the system now directly transitions the app to PIP mode on up-to-home, instead of waiting for the up-to-home animation to complete. This makes the transition smoother and improves perceived performance. We’ve also improved PIP window resizing for non-video content. Apps can nowenable seamless resize to let the system resize the PIP Activity when needed. Android 12 also supports stashing the PiP window by dragging it to the left or right edge of the screen. Also, to make PIP windows easier to manipulate, we’ve updated the tap behaviors. Single-tapping now displays controls, and double-tapping toggles the PIP window size. Morehere.

Keeping companion device apps awake- For apps that manage companion devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers, it can be a challenge to make sure the app is running and connected whenever an associated companion device is nearby. To make this easier, we’re extending theCompanion Device Manager with a newCompanionDeviceService API. Apps that manage companion devices can implement this service to let the system wake the app whenever the associated companion device is nearby. The system keeps the service bound whenever the device is nearby, and notifies the service when the device goes in and out of range or is turned off, to let the app clean up state as needed. Apps can also use a newcompanion device profile when connecting to a watch, which simplifies enrollment by bundling related permissions into a single grant. Morehere.

Bandwidth estimation improvements - for developers who need to know the typical bandwidth available to each user so you can tailor their experience, we now provide improved bandwidth estimation. We’ve enhanced the existingbandwidth estimation APIs to let you retrieve an estimate of aggregate throughput per carrier or Wi-Fi SSID, network type, and signal level, for all users on the device. The new estimation is likely to be easier and more accurate than most other estimation methods, give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

Easier blurs, color filters and other effects- In Android 12, we’re making it easier to apply common graphics effects to your Views and rendering hierarchies. You can useRenderEffect to apply blurs, color filters, and more to anyRenderNode. You can combine these effects as chain effects (which compose an inner and outer effect in order) or blend them. You can also apply effects directly to Views (leveraging the underlying RenderNode) by callingView.setRenderEffect(RenderEffect).

view.setRenderEffect(RenderEffect.createBlurEffect(radiusX, radiusY, SHADER_TILE_MODE))

Blurring a View with RenderEffect

This allows you to blur the contents of anImageView without having to get the bitmap data, process the image, create a newBitmap, and set it back into the ImageView. RenderEffect leverages the existing rendering pipeline to minimize excess calculation.

Give these a try and let use know what you think! Morehere.

You can also create a frosted glass effect for your window background using a newWindow.setBackgroundBlurRadius() API. With this you can set a radius to control the density and scope and the platform applies the blur to the background content within the bounds of your app’s window only. You can also useblurBehindRadius to blur all of the content behind the window to create a depth effect for a floating window.

A dialog window with background blur and blur behind...

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother by prioritizing app compatibility as we roll out new platform versions. In Android 12, we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

With Developer Preview 2, we’re well into the release and continuing to improve overall stability, so now is the time to try the new features and changes and give us your feedback. We’re especially looking for input on our APIs, as well as details on how theplatform changes affect your apps. Please visit thefeedback page to share your thoughts with us or report issues.

It’s also a good time to start yourcompatibility testing and identify any work you’ll need to do. We recommend doing the work early, so you can release a compatible update by Android 12 Beta 1. There’s no need to change your app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, but we do recommend using thebehavior change toggles to get a preliminary idea of how your app might be affected by opt-in changes in Android 12.

As we reachPlatform Stability in August 2021, all of the app-facing system behaviors, SDK/NDK APIs, and non-SDK lists will be finalized. At that point, you can wind up your final compatibility testing and release a fully compatible version of your app, SDK, or library. More on the timeline for developers ishere.

App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.