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Android 16 Beta 1 Update Officially Announced: Brings Support for App Adaptivity, Live Updates, APV Codec, and More

Followed by the first and second developer previews of Android 16, the first beta update among the four beta updates that have been planned is now available. The Android 16 beta 1 update brings a wide variety of features for both users and developers, which includes the support for app adaptivity, Live Updates, APV codec, and many more. Interested candidates can receive the OTA update for this Android 16 beta 1 update by enrolling for the Android Beta program on an eligible device.

Read more about the Android 16 beta 1 update below.

Android 16 – First Beta Update Announced

As mentioned, the Android 16 beta 1 update is the first of the four beta updates that will be rolled out before the official version release, and the most notable feature of this beta 1 update is the app adaptivity support. As of now, there are apps which prevent users from resizing or changing the orientation, and when this comes to a larger screen device such as a tablet, Chromebook, or a book-like foldable, it becomes not so well-appealing. Android 16 will now be able to surpass these restrictions set by app developers, enabling users to resize or change the orientation of the apps as per their needs.

The iOS Live Activities-like feature, Live Updates, is also an important feature that has now been introduced on Android 16 with the beta 1 update, which will display important notifications of ongoing activities prominently on the lock screen. Certain brands like Samsung and OnePlus have already brought similar features with their respective custom skins, however, it is limited due to the lack of support for a few third-party app compatibility.

Android 16 has also now received the support for the Samsung-developed Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, offering high quality video recording and post production. Some of the key features of the codec include perceptually lossless video quality, low complexity and high throughput intra-frame-only coding, high bit-rate range up to a few Gbps for 2K, 4K, and 8K resolution content, frame tiling for immersive content and parallel encoding & decoding, various chroma sampling formats and bit depths, multiple decoding and re-encoding without visual quality degradation, multi-view and auxiliary videos, and HDR10/HDR10+ and user-defined metadata.

Moreover, predictive back animations (now default for apps with back-to-home, cross-task, & cross-activity animations), predictive back support for three button navigation, and more Gemini features (on the way) are also revealed to be some of the user-focused features of Android 16 beta 1 version.

Speaking about the developer features or changes, generic ranging APIs, camera night mode scene detection, vertical text, supplemental descriptions, internal ART changes, fixed rate work scheduling optimization, and ordered broadcast priority scope are some of the new features or areas of improvements.

About the official version release, we are already aware that this time Google plans to release the major SDK update in Q2 2025, and later a minor SDK update will also be released in Q4 2025. Three more beta updates are also currently on the way, and it has been suggested that the platform stability will be achieved in the month of March 2025.

Stay tuned.

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