Android 15 Developer Preview One Now Available | Top Vip News

Our first official look at Android 15 is here. It includes many internal tweaks to strengthen communication between hardware and software, and comes at a time when Google has been strengthening its working relationship with its enemy Samsung. Focusing on the holistic health of the platform and working more closely with hardware partners makes a lot of sense. This is especially true if the goal is to compete with the company traditionally known for its elegant integration of hardware and software: Apple.

The first developer preview is available starting today, and public betas will arrive early this spring as Google works toward platform stability in June. Some of the updates relate to Android’s Dynamic Performance Framework that helps manage how power-hungry apps interact with the phone’s power system. These settings are intended to help the device better respond to the demands of its GPU, CPU, and thermal systems, and to help applications with long-running background tasks run energy-efficiently. Not exactly exciting, but important for overall performance.

Other updates focus on privacy, including stronger protections against malware infiltrating app files. Android 15 also includes the latest version of Privacy Sandbox, an ongoing initiative to find ways for apps to leverage targeted ads that maintain some semblance of user privacy in a post-cookiepocalyptic world.

However, it’s not all about privacy and performance optimization. There is support for partial screen recording function introduced in one of the quarterly beta versions of the Android 14 platform, allowing you to record only the content of an app instead of the entire screen. Android 15 also improves the camera experience in third-party apps, something Samsung has also been working on recently. Previews of low-light images will benefit from additional processing to make them appear brighter, more like what you’ll see after you press the shutter button. App developers will also be able to access the flash controls to adjust the intensity.

Android phone sales continue to lag far behind Apple’s in the US, and as the smartphone market shrinks overall, there are no signs of that trend changing any time soon. But there’s good news on the horizon: Apple will adopt RCS this year, making cross-platform messaging a little less terrible and perhaps taking some of the pain out of switching from an iPhone to Android. And closer ties between Samsung and Google could help put them in a better position. Strengthening integration between Android software and hardware across the ecosystem can only help these companies get more out of Apple.