I got so bogged down in details that I sat on this story for months, but in the interest of the community, I'd like to confirm that the encoders for Qualcomm's proprietary aptX and aptX HD Bluetooth codecs are now part of AOSP.

Here's what this means for Android 👇

A few months back, I spotted a patch submitted to AOSP by a Qcom engineer called "add encoder for aptX and encoder for aptX HD source code." aptX and aptX HD codecs are proprietary to Qualcomm, so OEMs would previously acquire them directly from them.

I don't know what, if any, certification programs OEMs had to complete, or how much in licensing fees they had to pay, to obtain permission from Qualcomm to ship aptX and aptX HD encoders in their Android products. One article says that at least in 2014, there was a $6,000 one-time payment and ~$1 per-device fee for batches of up to 10k devices. That info came from Silicon Laboratories, a fabless semiconductor firm that designs many Bluetooth products.

The Wiki article on aptX, before my edit, falsely claimed that the aptX & aptX HD encoders were added to AOSP in A10 and could be freely used by OEMs. That was NOT true at the time. The claim was added in Dec. 2019 but was a misreading of a SoundGuys article on BT codecs.

What is true is that since Android 8.0, the Bluetooth A2DP stack added support for loading AAC, aptX, aptX HD, and LDAC codecs IF they were present in the build. As noted in the docs, "device manufacturers may need to obtain separate licenses and binary blobs for some proprietary audio codecs."

This is where I fell down a rabbit hole of licensing and patents. AAC isn't free? LDAC needs certification? Etc. I'm done with that rabbit hole. I even briefly tried using ChatGPT to help me draft some of this article, but the tone/voice just didn't feel right to me, lol.

Anyway, when it comes to aptX/HD, OEMs would obtain encoders compatible with AOSP right from Qualcomm.

eg. on Pixel phones prior to Android 13 QPR2, you could find precompiled aptX and aptX HD encoders as shared libraries in /system_ext/lib64. Starting in Android 13 QPR2, those shared libraries are no longer there, as they are compiled statically into the Bluetooth APEX.

I believe that going forward, any OEM that ships the Bluetooth APEX in their AOSP-based project will have the aptX and aptX HD encoders available in their end product by default.

There is even a new MTS test (Mainline Test Suite) test for this. Of course, just because there is source code for something doesn't make it open source. That depends on the license.

To clarify this, I reached out directly to Qualcomm a few months back, and got the following statement (for context, in early Nov. 2022):

“We made the decision a few months back to include the encoders for classic aptX and aptX HD in the Android Open Source Project. The technology is known the world over as THE superior audio codec for wireless BT audio, and we have worked closely with both Google and individual OEM’s over the years to include these codecs in Android-based products. We are excited to say that under license from Qualcomm, these encoders are indeed now available under AOSP pursuant to the CLA’s in place. 

As aptX codecs continue to be the leader in delivering superior audio quality, and with our introduction of Snapdragon Sound in March 2021, Qualcomm is committed to ensuring we deliver premium audio experiences, the lowest possible latencies, and the best connectivity solutions available. As per our usual business processes, the licensing of aptX, Snapdragon Sound and the underlying technologies, will continue to remain unchanged apart from contributing the aptX and aptX HD encoders to AOSP."

And just to be extra extra sure, I asked Qualcomm to explicitly name the license and what products are covered:

"There are inbound and outbound licenses to the project of course. Once officially approved by Google - which we expect in the coming days since these were just recently submitted - the encoders will be offered under the outbound AOSP (Apache) license.”

“The purpose of the contribution is to enable people to distribute the encoders as part of their finished products. The only Qualcomm products included in this release for Android are aptX and aptX HD ENCODERS. All other aptX products require a license direct from Qualcomm."

So there you go, you no longer need to undergo certification or pay a licensing fee to Qualcomm if you want to include an aptX and/or aptX HD encoder in your ANDROID product, so long as you utilize the code in AOSP licensed under Apache v2.0.

This is great news for hobbyist custom ROM developers as well, as previously they'd have to just rip the shared libraries from a precompiled build (with questionable legality). Now you can just compile them from AOSP sources.

And yes, they do work as shared libraries if you change the blueprint to compile them as such.

Here's the source code in AOSP if you're interested:

Encoder for aptX | Encoder for aptX High Definition

Since I know most of you have devices that support aptX and aptX HD already, you're wondering why you should care. Well, for most users, this doesn't matter. It's a change that affects OEMs for the most part.

Surprisingly there are some devices that don't have either aptX or aptX HD, though. My NVIDIA SHIELD TV, for example, only supports aptX but not aptX HD.

Several users are reporting that the "ring & notification volume" sliders have been suddenly split into "ring volume" and "notification volume" in Android 14 DP2. This is WITHOUT them flipping any flags, which was previously required to enable separate ring/notification volume.

Google added this feature in Android 13 QPR2, as I first reported in December. The feature is gated by a DeviceConfig flag ("volume_separate_notification" under the "systemui" namespace), but it appears Google remotely toggled the flag for users on DP2.

If you are on Android 13 QPR2 or later, you can manually enable this feature by sending the following shell command:

device_config put systemui volume_separate_notification true

It's possible this was a mistake and will be reverted soon. It's hard to tell, because it was a server-side change with no announcement from Google. If Android 14 adds a settings toggle to enable/disable linking the volumes, then we'll know if it's intentional or not.

You can view the code changes implementing this feature in AOSP: [1] [2] [3]

Google could also add a settings toggle in a future Android 13 QPR3 beta, since it's not like this feature requires making any changes to the API surface which is frozen. I'll keep an eye out.

Please keep this feature around and add a setting toggle for it, Google. People clearly want this feature!

—-

EDIT: The DeviceConfig flag was removed in the stable QPR2 release. It is present in QPR3 Beta 1 and Android 14 DP1/DP2, however. H/T Aswin A S

Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo are collaborating to make setting up a new Android phone easier when you switch brands. Phones from these brands will support migrating "system data" like "photos and contacts" and - more importantly - third-party app data between one another.

This collab was announced by Xiaomi on Weibo (H/T @AndroidPolice), so it's unclear if this will apply to each company's respective global software versions. Still, setting up a new Android phone can be a pain, especially when you're switching brands, so this is a welcome change.

When you buy a new phone from the same brand that made your old one, chances are that brand's proprietary data transfer tool will move almost everything over. That's not the case when switching brands, as only a limited set of data (usually excluding 3P app data) is transferred.

Full data backups and restores is something Android has lacked for a LONG time, but it's not that Android can't do it (GMS certainly could, and Titanium Backup has existed since forever)...it's ironing out the complications that arise when it is done.

Lots of apps make certain assumptions/have certain configs that apply to certain kinds of devices/devices from specific brands. Or there's a specific per-device token that needs to be reissued (just look up threads on broken push notifications after restoring data using Titanium Backup.)

Since the source code for Android 13 QPR2 was released, let's take a look at some of the under-the-hood and lesser known changes in this thread👇

Android has supported live wallpapers since Android 2.0 Eclair was released in 2009, but finally with Android 14 in 2023, you may be able to set a different live wallpaper for the home and lock screen.

Details here.

Android's share sheet is getting a handful of improvements in Android 14. The biggest one is a dedicated row for app-defined actions, which should hopefully convince some apps to ditch their custom share sheets and use the OS's!

More details here.

In Android 13 QPR3 Beta 1, currently ONLY the Google Home app is allowed to embed a custom activity in SystemUI's Device Controls interface.

This is because only packages declared in the config_controlsPreferredPackages array can declare activities for use as a panel, and this array currently only holds the package name for the Google Home app (com.google.android.apps.chromecast.app) on Pixels' Android 13 QPR3 Beta 1 builds.

A separate SysUI flag (APP_PANELS_ALL_APPS_ALLOWED) overrides this to allow panels from all apps, but this is disabled by default in Android 13 QPR3 Beta 1 but enabled by default in Android 14 DP2 (which makes sense since this is now a public API in Android 14).

CameraX will soon support concurrent camera streams, allowing you to record from two cameras simultaneously at 720p or 1440p resolution.

The Camera2 API for concurrent camera streaming was introduced in Android 11, so it's nice to see support finally extend to CameraX as well!

Google tested CameraX's Concurrent Camera API on the Pixel 6 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S21, and OnePlus 7 Pro. But there are many more models that support concurrent camera streams.

According to the Google Play Console's Device Catalog, 179 device models declare android.hardware.camera.concurrent, the feature indicating that the vendor correctly configured the front and back cameras to support concurrent camera streaming.

(A great read on the concurrent camera streaming API.)

Although Android has supported the EXT4 file system for a very long time now (Pixels and many others have their read-only system/product/etc partitions formatted in it), you still can't mount external USB/SDcard drives formatted in EXT4.

Well, MediaTek is trying once again to get Google to allow this by introducing a patch to vold (Android's volume daemon) that will add support for mounting EXT4 drives.

A similar patch was rejected in 2020 for security reasons, however: "unfortunately complex filesystems (such as ext4) cannot be mounted directly from untrusted media, due to the potential security vulnerabilities in these complex filesystems. The only safe way to mount these complex filesystems is when they've been wrapped in an encryption layer (such as offered by Adoptable Storage) to ensure that a malicious actor cannot tamper with the contents." - Jeff Sharkey

Android is adding a new "enhanced PIN privacy" feature that will disable animations when entering your PIN on the lock screen!

This will hopefully make it harder for shoulder surfers to steal your PIN while you're out in public.

Full details here.