Back in early October, it became known that the Android 16 operating system would be released earlier than usual (details), and today Google unexpectedly released Android 16 Developer Preview 1, which indirectly confirms this.
There are quite interesting innovations in this Android build.:
- A new list of APIs for photo pictors, which are a pop-up menu that appears when media data is loaded in third-party applications. Previously, to send a photo or video, you had to give the app permission to access the entire storage, which does not fit well with security and privacy. With the new APIs in Android 16, apps will only access the files that have been selected for download.
- An update to the Health Connect technology that stores your health data obtained from different platforms.
- The Privacy Sandbox update is a system that is designed to solve a number of problems with tracking users on the Network, but the details here, unfortunately, have not yet been disclosed.
Hopefully, these are just the first innovations introduced in Android 16, and in later builds Google will add other useful features to the new version of Android.
By the way, apparently, the Developer Preview phase should end in December, and in January the first beta builds available to ordinary users should be released.
The final release of Android 16 is expected in May or June, and future devices of the Pixel 10 family can be released on the new Android right out of the box.