Android 12 DP3 Analysis: Here are all the hidden features! By Aquihaddock
n less than a month, Google will take the wraps off of Android 12 at Google I/O, but before then, we’ve just been given the third Developer Preview to sift through. DP3 contains a handful of new APIs and noticeable user-facing changes, but it also, as usual, contains loads of hidden changes under-the-hood. We’ve been digging into the release to find out everything that’s coming to Android 12, and here’s a summary of what we found in Developer Preview 3.
A quick note: Today’s DP3 release is actually older than the leaked Android 12 build we detailed last week. Some of the features we spotted in that leaked build are now available to all users, but many of them aren’t available. In fact, code for some of the hidden features we spotted — such as a framework for app UI translations — hasn’t even been added to DP3 at all. Conversely, there are some features, like the improved Game Dashboard and new Quick Settings panel design that we’ll detail below, that we weren’t able to activate in that leaked build. I won’t be rehashing every hidden change in DP3 that we spotted earlier in the leaked build, but I will make note of changes that corroborate what we found in the leaked build.
Now that that’s out of the way, here’s our analysis of Android 12 Developer Preview 3. Special thanks to developer kdrag0n for working with us and for sharing many of their findings over chat!
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
