Author Archives: Trystan Upstill

What’s beta than Android 13?

Every year and with every release, we make Android better based on your feedback. With Android 13, we’re continuing to improve the quality and performance of the platform while building on many areas that matter most to you, like privacy and security, personalization and large-screen devices.

Today, we’re sharing more about Android 13 and releasing the second beta across many Android phones, tablets and foldable devices.

A foundation of privacy and security

In Android 13, we’re giving you more control over what personal information you share and more detailed control over what files your apps can access. Instead of permitting access to “Files and media,” there are two new categories you can control access to: “Photos & videos” and “Music & audio.” For even more specificity, a new photo picker lets you select the exact photos or videos you want to grant access to, without needing to share your entire media library with an app.

We’re also helping you be more deliberate about how you engage with apps. While app notifications often provide helpful and timely reminders, you should have more control over which apps you want to receive notifications from. In Android 13, apps must get your permission before sending you notifications. In addition, we’re reducing the number of apps that require your location. For example, you will no longer need to grant location to apps to enable Wi-Fi scanning.

Android 13 goes further to help you stay ahead of risks, with timely recommendations and options to enhance your privacy. You already receive an alert when an app accesses your clipboard. Now, Android will go further and automatically delete your clipboard history after a short period so apps are preemptively blocked from seeing old copied information.

Later this year, we’ll introduce a unified Security & Privacy settings page in Android 13 that brings all your device’s data privacy and security front and center. This will provide a clear, color-coded indicator of your safety status and offer guidance and steps you can take to boost your security.

Within the Security & Privacy settings page, there is a color-coded safety status that indicates safety status. On the top of this user’s screen it  reads “Looks good” with a green check mark beside it.

Personalized experiences for you

Last year, we introduced Material You to help your phone adapt to your style and preferences. With Android 13, we’re going further to customize your phone’s look and feel with pre-made color variants. Once a color scheme has been selected, you’ll see beautiful color variants applied across the entire OS to accentuate your wallpaper and style.

Different color variants applied across the calculator app of 4 phone shells on a floral orange wallpaper

Android 13 also extends color theming of your app icons beyond Google apps. Starting with Pixel devices, you’ll be able to turn on the “Themed icons” toggle in your settings to have all supported apps also match your phone’s colors in a minimal, modern and consistent look.

Apps on the home screen are all light orange and gray to match the orange floral wallpaper

We’re also introducing a new media control that tailors its look based on the music that you’re listening to, featuring the album’s artwork.

A phone’s lockscreen with a media player in the center with colorful artwork playing a song.

Personalization in Android 13 extends beyond the design and aesthetic of the phone’s interface to other areas that are important and unique to you, like your language preferences. If you’re multilingual, you likely use different languages depending on the situation and may change how you communicate from one instance to the next. For example, you might enjoy social media in one language, but bank in another. Android 13 helps you use language as fluidly as you do in real life, so you can select a different language preference for each of your apps in Settings.

While in Settings, a user selects ShareChat and has a list of languages to choose the app to run in such as the System language, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and more

Tablets just keep getting better

Android 12L’s updates optimized the layout for bigger screen devices. Android 13 builds on this foundation by introducing better multitasking capabilities for tablets. With the updated taskbar, you can easily switch your single tablet view to a split screen. Just drag and drop any second app in your app library onto your screen and you’ll be able to do two or more things at once with ease.

A tablet user drags and drops apps like Google Photos and Gmail into split screen from the new All Apps entry point in their taskbar.

We’re also improving the experience for when you’re writing or drawing with a stylus pen. In Android 13, you can rest your hand comfortably on the screen without worrying about it being misidentified as a stylus pen, reducing any unintended actions.

We know these changes don’t mean much if apps aren’t built for the larger screens. So over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating more than 20 Google apps to take full advantage of the extra space with added functionality. Many of the third-party apps you love — like TikTok, Facebook and Zoom — will be revamped to make your experiences on tablets even better.

Try out Android 13 features, with more on the way

Android 13 has much more in store, including features that shape modern standards for audio and video like HDR video, Spatial Audio and Bluetooth Low Energy Audio.

You can find many of these features today in the second beta of Android 13. We have a great lineup of beta partners and we can’t wait for you to try it on your favorite device.

The new Google News: AI meets human intelligence

In the nearly 30 years since the world wide web launched, more than 2 billion websites have been created. It can feel impossible to keep up with the hundreds of thousands of tweets, tens of thousands of pages, and hundreds of hours of video that come online every single minute.

Amid this deluge of information, important new voices are constantly emerging. There’s more diverse content to discover and more great journalism being produced than ever before. In order to make it easier to keep up and make sense of it all, we set out to bring our news products into one unified experience.  

Today we’re rolling out an all new Google News, which uses the best of artificial intelligence to find the best of human intelligence—the great reporting done by journalists around the globe.

Using real-time AI/ML to organize the news

When we created the original Google News 15 years ago, we simply organized news articles to make it easier to see a range of sources on the same topic.  

The reimagined Google News uses a new set of AI techniques to take a constant flow of information as it hits the web, analyze it in real time and organize it into storylines. This approach means Google News understands the people, places and things involved in a story as it evolves, and connects how they relate to one another. At its core, this technology lets us synthesize information and put it together in a way that helps you make sense of what’s happening, and what the impact or reaction has been.

A news experience that keeps you fully informed

For many of us, news comes from dozens of different places—sports from a favorite website, politics from TV, and news about your community from your local paper.

When you’re in the app, “For You” makes it easy to stay up to date on everything you care about all in one place. We start with a briefing of five stories that Google News has organized for you—a mix of the most important headlines, local news and the latest developments on the topics you’re interested in.  

gnews_blog_briefing.gif

And the more you use the app, the better the app gets. We’ve also built easy-to-use and easy-to-access controls so you can decide if you want to see more or less of a topic or publisher.

As we built the app, we focused on letting the stories speak for themselves with great images and videos from YouTube and across the web. To help you quickly get you up to speed, we’re experimenting with a unique visual format called newscasts. Here, the latest developments in natural language understanding bring together a collection of articles, videos and quotes on a single topic. Newscasts make it easy to dive right into perspectives to learn more about a story—plus, it’s easy to read on your phone.

Full Coverage: Understanding the full story

If you want to get a deeper insight into a story, the “Full Coverage” feature provides a complete picture of how that story is reported from a variety of sources. With just a tap you’ll see top headlines from different sources, videos, local news reports, FAQs, social commentary, and a timeline for stories that have played out over time.

Having a productive conversation or debate requires everyone to have access to the same information. That’s why content in Full Coverage is the same for everyone—it’s an unpersonalized view of events from a range of trusted news sources.

To find out what the world is reading, head over to Headlines for an unfiltered view of news from around the world. Additional sections let you dig into more on technology, business, sports, entertainment and others.

gnews_blog_fullCoverage.gif

The best journalism from around the web

Of course Google News wouldn’t exist without the great journalism being created every day. The Newsstand tab makes it easy to find and follow the sources you trust, as well as browse and discover new ones. You can also access more than 1,000 magazine titles in a mobile-optimized reading format.  

gnews_blog_newsstand.gif

And if you want to support your favorite news sources, we’ve made it simple to subscribe with your Google account. This means no more forms, credit card numbers, or new passwords. And soon, thanks to the new Subscribe with Google platform (launched as a part of the Google News Initiative), you’ll get access to your paid content everywhere—on all platforms and devices, on Google News, Google Search, and on publishers’ own websites.

What’s next

The all-new Google News replaces Google Play Newsstand on mobile and desktop and the Google News & Weather app on mobile. It's rolling out starting today and will be available to everyone on Android, iOS and the web in 127 countries by next week.