The primary beta of Android 17 is now obtainable, and it encompasses a change in how the Android growth crew shares new releases of Android to builders.
A brand new steady Canary channel now replaces the normal Developer Preview mannequin, offering builders entry to options and APIs as quickly as they cross testing as a substitute of ready for quarterly releases.
Different advantages of the Canary channel are that beta releases are extra secure, OTA updates are supported, and it affords simpler integration with CI workflows.
As for what’s new in Android 17, builders needs to be conscious that the opt-out for orientation and resizability restrictions on massive display gadgets might be eliminated on this launch. A number of attributes and APIs might be ignored when an app is operating on a big display, together with resizableActivity, minAspectRatio, and maxAspectRatio, in addition to some values of screenOrientation and setRequestedOrientation().
“When your app targets SDK 37, it should be able to adapt. Customers count on their apps to work in every single place—whether or not multitasking on a pill, unfolding a tool, or utilizing a desktop windowing atmosphere—they usually count on the UI to fill the area and respect their system posture,” the Android crew wrote in a weblog publish.
These adjustments won’t apply to screens smaller than 600dp or to apps categorized as video games. Customers also can opt-in or opt-out of utilizing an app’s default habits within the system’s side ratio settings.
A associated change is that the default habits for Exercise recreation is being up to date, and Android will not restart actions for configuration adjustments that don’t require a UI recreation, and can as a substitute obtain these updates by means of onConfigurationChanged.
Efficiency updates embody a lock-free MessageQueue, generational rubbish assortment in ART’s Concurrent Mark-Compact collector, elimination of the flexibility to switch static remaining fields, dimension restrictions on customized notification views, and new system triggers in ProfilingManager for higher debugging.
Android 17 can even introduce updates throughout media and digicam apps, similar to help for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) customary, the flexibility to require metadata from a number of cameras, and background audio hardening.
Different updates embody deprecation of the CleartextTraffic attribute, HPKE hybrid cryptography, enhanced VoIP name historical past, and proximity detecting for Wi-Fi Ranging.
And at last, for builders, the crew has added two new profiles to the CompanionDeviceManager. The Medical Gadgets profile permits medical apps to request all needed permissions with a single immediate, and the Health Trackers profile permits companion apps to obviously present that they’re managing a health tracker.
The Android growth crew says that platform stability for this model is deliberate for March, after which Android 17 will obtain a serious SDK launch with app breaking habits adjustments in Q2 and a minor SDK with further APIs and options in This fall of this 12 months.
