Google has unleashed the first of four betas for Android 16.
One key change from previous Android iterations is the phasing out of the ability for apps to restrict screen orientation and resizability on large screens.
“Users expect apps to work seamlessly on all their devices, regardless of display size and form factor,” said Matthew McCullough, VP of Product Management, Android Developer.
“This is similar to features OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] have added over the last several years to large screen devices to allow users to run apps at any window size and aspect ratio.”
On screens larger than 600dp wide, apps that target API level 36 will have app windows that resize. The advice is to check your apps to ensure your existing UIs “scale seamlessly, working well across portrait and landscape aspect ratios”, McCullough said.
“Manifest attributes and APIs that restrict orientation and resizing will be ignored for apps – but not games – on large screens.”
Android said it’s providing frameworks, tooling and libraries to help.
“It’s time to open the experience up to both developers and early adopters,” said McCullough.
He said you can now enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android Beta updates over-the-air.
“This build includes support for the future of app adaptivity, Live Updates, the Advanced Professional Video format. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.”
Android 16 will “advance support” for the playback, creation and editing of “high-quality media, a critical use case for social and productivity apps”.
It introduces support for the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec. The APV codec standard has the following features:
- Perceptually lossless video quality (close to raw video quality);
- Low complexity and high throughput intra-frame-only coding (without pixel domain prediction) to better support editing workflows;
- Support for high bit-rate range up to a few Gbps for 2K, 4K and 8K resolution content, enabled by a lightweight entropy coding scheme;
- Frame tiling for immersive content and for enabling parallel encoding and decoding;
- Support for various chroma sampling formats and bit-depths;
- Support for multiple decoding and re-encoding without severe visual quality degradation;
- Support multi-view video and auxiliary video like depth, alpha and preview;
- Support for HDR10/10+ and user-defined metadata.
