It's a bit earlier than usual, but it seems the internal dessert code-name for Android 15 V has been revealed: "Vanilla Ice Cream".

vic-dev is real, or so I've heard, but the only public reference to it is these Tradefed commits.

H/T teamb58

—-

EDIT:

If you're thinking this is *really really* early, it's actually not. There's always going to be feature ideas/concepts that Google wants to implement but there's not enough time to add it to the current release, so they either already plan ahead for the next one or punt it.

For example, the new "Background Install Control" system service added in Android 14 was designed to power some unannounced features in Android 15 as well.

So what I really meant by "it's a bit earlier than usual" is how early we find out about the code-name. We learned about Android 14 U's internal dessert code-name (Upside Down Cake) in late April 2022.

...not that the internal dessert code-name actually matters, of course.

The March 2023 Android Security Bulletin has just gone live, detailing the vulnerabilities addressed by the 2023-03-01 and 2023-03-05 security patch levels.

As I previously reported, security backports have officially ended for Android 10.

As of Android 13 QPR1, you can no longer start the screen saver programmatically by launching SystemUI's "Somnambulator" activity.

This means "Daydream Launcher" on Google Play will no longer work.

If you relied on this for automation, you'll have to find another solution.

For example, you can use cmd dreams start-dreaming and cmd dreams stop-dreaming on Android 13 QPR1 and later to start and stop the screen saver respectively. However, this requires superuser privileges. I think you should be able to start the screen saver with Shizuku, though, since the shell package holds the WRITE_DREAM_STATE permission.

Working on turning an unused Android tablet of mine into a dedicated smart home hub, and I needed a way to programmatically start the screen saver. This tablet runs Android 11, so this change doesn't affect my project, but I thought some of you might want to know.

Google I/O 2023 starts May 10th!

Source

Android 14 DP2 is here! Google just announced it over on the Android Developers blog. Follow me on Twitter to see my full breakdown of what’s new, but first, read my summary here of what Google announced.

The first Android 13 QPR3 Beta will be released this coming Monday, March 13, according to the /u/androidbetaprogram account on Reddit.

Detailed instructions on how to migrate from the Android 13 QPR2 Beta to the upcoming Android 13 QPR2 stable release (which is "releasing this month") WITHOUT wiping data can be found in this Reddit post.

The rollout of the February 2023 Google Play System Update was completed earlier this week, but I only just got time to generate a changelog. Here are some notable changes:

* ART's new userfaultfd-based garbage collection algorithm is still not ready for public testing, but it might go live in the next train. [1] [2]

* Photo picker has been updated to support the "selected photos access" feature seen in Android 14, but PermissionController in the Feb. 2023 train doesn't support this. It's likely it won't be enabled for Android 13 devices anyway. [1]

* Safety Center has a new flag to control whether it can send notifications alerting you about potential security issues, such as reviewing apps with full device access (Accessibility). (I thought it already did this?) [1] [2]

If you want to see the full January 2023 --> February 2023 GPSU changelog yourself, you can do so here.

There's someone impersonating me and sending DMs to many of you here.

I will never send you a DM out of the blue, especially one that has nothing to do with Android in any way, so please disregard any DM that looks like it's coming from me. It's probably a scam.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

The March 2023 update is now rolling out for Pixel phones. The TQ2A.230305.008 build is based on the Android 13 QPR2 release. It also brings the latest Pixel Feature Drop, but Google's blog post on that hasn't gone live yet.

Here's a summary of available features (per device) in the new Pixel Feature Drop:

You can learn more in Google's blog post.

At the Google for Games Developer Summit, Google announced the following improvements to Google Play Games for PC, a build of Android for Windows PCs.

* Improved onboarding process
* Upcoming expansion to Japan and countries in Europe
* New games like Garena Free Fire, Ludo King, and MapleStory M
* Developers can now submit their existing mobile builds
* A new developer emulator for testing that allows for sideloading APKs or adjusting settings
* New release checklist to verify if you've done what's important before releasing your game
* Next-gen player IDs will roll out later this year that keep a user's player ID consistent across surfaces for any given game while letting them be unique across games

Also at the Google for Games Developer Summit, Google announced:

* Google Play's technical quality bar now uses new user-perceived crash and ANR metrics evaluated on a per-device (8%) and overall (1.09% for crash, 0.47% for ANR) basis. This was actually announced in October 2022 but seems to be more widely rolling out, as I noted earlier this month.

* Frame rate metrics for games in Android vitals have launched, and you can see them in the Play Console or with the Developer Reporting API

* Updates to Firebase Crashlytics to improve the quality of Unity stack traces, including Unity on-demand-fatal event reporting.

* New Adaptability APIs in the Android Game Development Kit to help games respond to changing device performance and thermal scenarios. The Android Dynamic Performance Framework adds a hinting library to send signals about your game's workload to the CPU. A new Thermal API to listen during runtime for when the device is about to thermally throttle.

* LiveOps tools have relaunched as promotional content and are available to more developers.

* Inactive custom store listings to target churned users.

* Machine translation in Play Console, uses Google Translate to translate your app's strings in over 8 languages including Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Google's method of remotely bricking leaked/stolen phones (like the Pixel 7a that recently made the rounds) is actually open source!

They generate what's called a "brick OTA" that wipes the following partitions:

vbmeta
vbmeta_a
vbmeta_b
vbmeta_system_a
vbmeta_system_b
boot
boot_a
boot_b
vendor_boot
vendor_boot_a
vendor_boot_b
init_boot
metadata
super
userdata

This "brick OTA" is pushed to devices via GOTA (Google OTA) and can be installed on both "test-keys" and "release-keys" builds, but a serial number is required before a "brick OTA" can be installed on "release-keys" builds.

Many OEMs don't use GOTA, but a lot of them now do use update_engine, so Google's new automated "Android Brick OTA generator" tool might find some use outside of Google.

The Linux kernel's MGLRU feature will be enabled by default for all Android 14 kernels! (android14-5.15 and android14-6.1).

Benchmarks have shown that with MGLRU, overall app launch times improve, there are fewer overall process kills, kswapd CPU use decreases, etc.

"MGLRU has been tested and edge cases addressed on Android workloads; after which the MGLRU showed good results across various performance metrics. Enable the MGLRU as default memory reclaim in algorithm."

You can check if your kernel is compiled with MGLRU support (and whether it's enabled) with this command:

adb shell "cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip | grep 'CONFIG_LRU_GEN'"

CONFIG_LRU_GEN=y means it's available but not enabled

CONFIG_LRU_GEN_ENABLED=y means it's enabled

Google has been A/B testing this feature for the past few months, making it something they can enable using a DeviceConfig flag that can be enabled server-side, but AFAIK they haven't enabled this feature on any devices in production, though all Tensor Pixels can support it.

For more details on MGLRU, check out this earlier thread.

Google has just released Android 13 QPR3 Beta 1! This is the first beta release for what will be Android 13's final QPR that will be released to users in June 2023.

This QPR will have the least amount of user-facing changes of all but should be the most stable release of Android 13 yet.

You may see some of the minor QoL features/changes that were first seen in the Android 14 DP, so don't be surprised.