Google’s vision for Android 13 is to offer a little more of it all

Google has outlined its vision for this year’s major Android update, which looks set to continue many of the customization and privacy initiatives introduced by the search giant with last year’s Android 12. Its customizable Material You color schemes will now be available as preset themes and is also extended to cover third-party apps icons and the media player. There are also new security features, including a dedicated privacy and security menu.

The direction is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Android 13’s early beta versions. But today’s announcements, which coincide with the search giant’s annual Google I / O developer conference, see the company set out its overall vision for this year’s major Android update. The search giant is releasing Android 13’s second public beta today to coincide with the announcements.

Following last year’s Custom You Material You themes, Android can already match its color scheme to your phone’s wallpaper. This year, the media controls will also receive a similar Material You-style overhaul and will be able to extract colors from the album cover of the music being played. Another new feature for those who do not want or need the theme of their phone to match their wallpaper exactly is a range of optional preset color schemes to choose from.

Android 13s prefabricated Material You color variants.
Image: Google

Material You theme settings also come with third-party app icons, which appeared in Android 13’s first developer preview in February. “This was a bit of a missing piece for us in the last release,” explains Google’s Vice President of Product Management, Sameer Samat. “It felt like everything in the system’s user interface got the fine Material You treatment except the icons. For us, it always felt like an unfinished business.” The new app theme themes first come to Pixel devices and only work with supported apps.

Google Messages’ RCS support is also set to make a big improvement later this year with the beta launch of end-to-end encryption for group chat, a feature currently only available in one-to-one RCS Chat in Google Messages. The search giant says the standard, which aims to be a successor to the now age-old SMS and MMS protocols, is now available to over 500 million Google Messages users worldwide.

As we have seen from its beta version, Android 13 also places more restrictions on the personal data and phone features that apps can use by default. Soon, apps will have to ask for permission to send messages themselves in the first place, and there is also a new photo selector that lets you restrict the photos and videos an app can access, instead of giving permission to see your entire library. New permissions will also restrict apps from accessing either “Photos & Videos” or “Music & Audio” files instead of all file types.

A new security and privacy settings page will be added later this year to gather all your important data protection information in one place. It is designed to encourage Android users to resolve any security issues that may arise.

Android 13 allows you to set languages ​​on an app-by-app basis.
Image: Google

Aside from the Android phones themselves, Google also emphasizes the work it does with pairing with other devices. It plans to add fast pairing support to the incoming Matter smart home standard this fall to make it quick and easy to use an Android phone to add supported smart home devices to your network. Support for the new power-saving Bluetooth LE Audio standard is also on the way in Android 13.

One last feature worth mentioning: Android 13 allows users to set system language per. app, a feature that Samat says is useful for multilingual users who depend on different languages ​​in different situations. “If you use a social media app, you can use one language. But if you tap, you might use another language,” he explains.

After the chaotic rollout of Android 12, it might be reassuring to see that Google’s focus this year is on refining rather than revolutionizing Android. There is no massive change of direction here, just a constant series of tweaks and improvements to Android’s existing initiatives.