Android 12 Beta 3 - Everything you need to know

Hello again ladies and gentlemen today we'll take a quick look at the third android 12 beta which includes a few new features and some other stuff so let's get started 

In terms of design the third beta continues where the previous two left off it includes a revamped wallpapers and style application that more or less fits in better with android 12. the design of the new app falls more in line with the design of the os as a whole continuing google's vision for a more cohesive visual experience across the entire os the big story though is the inclusion of the color picker this was absent from the second beta basically it lets you choose your own colors and overrides the automatic colors chosen by the os when you choose a new wallpaper this version of the color picker is super basic and only includes a few colors however it gives you a pretty good idea of how it's going to work beta 3 wasn't chock full of new design elements it was more or less just that one there are probably some other minor ui changes and animations that I missed but I didn't notice anything too different from beta 2. 

The new features is where the exciting stuff is for this android 12 beta release for starters we finally get these scrolling screenshots we've been asking about for god knows how long you simply take a screenshot and there is a capture more button that now pops up tap it and the phone will screenshot as far down as it can scroll stitch it together and leave you with a screenshot your friends on social media will hate you for posting google has tried this with limited success in the past so hopefully this is the version that sticks it worked pretty well in my testing and google says it should work with most apps out of the gate in addition android 12 

Now uses both the front-facing camera as well as the accelerometer to decide when to go into landscape or portrait mode basically the accelerometer will detect a change in orientation but your face may not have changed its orientation like if you're using your phone in bed and you're laying on your side the camera will work in tandem with the accelerometer to ensure that the display orientation changes based on where your face actually is because the accelerometer can't see your face and it doesn't know if you're laying in bed or are upside down or right side up this is an opt-in feature for now so it's not turned on out of the box some people may be a bit worried in terms of privacy so good on google for letting us choose if we want to use it you can enable the feature by going into the settings then display scroll on down to the auto rotate screen section and the setting isn't there google does say that no images are stored on your device or anywhere else if you turn it on 

Finally google announced a new on-device search called app search it basically searches through the applications installed on your phone to find stuff that may be in the applications themselves I can't really show you an example for this one because no apps use it yet but you'll be able to search for things like calendar events stuff from your to-do list application of choice and other such things without needing to open the application itself the api for this is live for developers to include it so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing some examples and that's it for new features in this release but it is adding to a growing list of features in android 12 overall and it's honestly surprising to still be getting new features this late into the development cycle 

As per the norm under the hood changes are plentiful in the new beta most of the features I mentioned in the previous sections have a new api so developers can build applications that work better with them for example the scroll capture api lets applications better support google's native scrolling screenshots if they want to all of those are added in this beta release in addition the aforementioned auto rotate feature was also optimized and can go from porsche to landscape and back 25 faster thanks to these optimizations you do get that performance boost whether or not you opt into the front-facing camera feature I mentioned earlier 

Some of the other stuff that came with the android 12 beta 3 include the play as you download feature that we talked about on the site long before now in short the google play store downloads your games in such a way that you can start playing them while it continues to download in the background like you can on game consoles in addition a new gamemode api announcement tells us that a gaming dashboard of some kind is coming to android 12 and that game developers can start planning for it basically the dashboard will let users decide things like if they want games optimized for battery life during long commutes or performance mode for high frame rates the api's for the developers allow them to optimize their games for whatever the user chooses google says the gaming dashboard is coming later this year to select devices 

Finally this should be the final beta release where google really focuses on adding more stuff the next beta release will finalize the api's and focus more on stability as we ramp up to the final release later this year basically if it's not here yet there's a better than average chance it won't make it to this year's version of android finally let's get down to all of the security improvements that google made in this beta release and by improvements I mean improvement because there was actually only one the new mic and camera indicators went live in beta 2 along with the toggles but they seem to be getting in the way of some ui elements in some apps google added a privacy indicator api so developers can see where these indicators appear google isn't moving them but they're giving developers an easy way to see where they might be so they can plan their apps around it 

So believe it or not i actually had some problems with this beta the new wallpaper and style application crashed on me twice and then magically started working again out of nowhere additionally this little search bar in the app drawer looks like garbage for some reason and it was also slow and funky acting it's rare to see such issues in a beta release but it is a beta so it's not entirely surprising what is surprising is google adding features this late into the development cycle usually an os update only includes one or two notable features all year but google has added several this year and it's honestly just building my hype for the final release everything looks so fresh and different with many parts of the os 

Finally starting to look like one another so it doesn't feel like you're using something developed by a dozen different teams that don't talk to each other the on device search could be cool depending on how app developers integrate it with their existing apps while the faster and less stupid auto rotation along with these scrolling screenshots smooth out some rough edges that people have complained about for years that said this is beta 3 and we've only got one more beta until the final release i will continue to reserve my full judgment until the big day but let me tell you something this is the most fun i've had writing os blog in a few years so I'm pretty excited and I hope you are too big os updates like this don't just come along very often anymore and that about does it for this one folks if you like this blog you know what to do!