Android 12 New Update of the Smartphone, 5 Amazing Feature’s

I guess Android 12 got a little too crazy because now we’re just on straight numbers.

It’s usually named after sweets like marshmallow or KitKat, or Oreo Jellybean something like that.

But, Android 12 feels like easily the biggest Android redesign to happen since maybe the beginning.

Like, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of visual changes to Android over the years.

But this is truly the biggest one. Because visually, everything is different.

Everything. I feel like I was actually kind of surprised when I saw all these big changes because androids been, you know, maturing, and you know, doing little refinements and subtle tweaks over the years.

But I’m on beta two of Android 12 here on this Pixel 5, and both under the hood, and on the surface, there’s a lot to take in.

I’m going to go through my top 5 biggest changes slash biggest new features in order of importance.

So of course, the timeline for when you get this update is going to depend on what phone you have some of you with Pixels will get this update Android 12 earlier than others.

But when you do finally get Android 12, you should be prepared, you should know what to expect.

This article is for Android 12 lover.

Android 12 Speed

This is more of a back-end thing. But Android is just going to be getting even smoother and faster.

You want to see them get as fast and smooth as possible, close the gap with iOS. I always welcome this stuff.

So, in Android 12, Google streamlines the CPU time for core system services by 22%.

That’s a pretty big jump.

That means no matter what hardware you’re on whether you have an older chip, or a Snapdragon triple eight, as long as it’s running Android 12, things should feel a bit smoother, less jitter, less Junk, and stutter.

At this time Android 12 is the beta 2 on my Pixel.

But I’m liking a lot of the new animations and the overall smoothness of things when flipping through the UI.

And you know, there’s no limit to how much optimization is a good thing.

But with this software, combined with the rumors sort of floating around that Google may be designing their silicon for the first time on this next Pixel.

That combined could be pretty sweet. As far as the overall experience, I don’t want to get my hopes up too high.

But just want to give that a shout-out.

Android 12 New Widgets

These I think might fly under the radar a little bit because not everybody uses these.

But widgets, there are new widgets. there’s a new widget selector. And there’s a new set of all completely redesigned widgets in Android 12.

I just have the new widget picker.

But I love this just mainly because for every app that has any widgets, it now will show you in line every single widget that that app gives you how it’ll look before you even add it to the home screen.

There’s no guessing when you start adding things. And that’s very intuitive.

Again, you probably only have to set up your widgets occasionally, maybe once in a while.

But that’s great. Now, the newly redesigned widgets themselves aren’t in this software yet.

But I have some screen recordings straight from Google themselves, that show what some of these new widgets are about.

And they’re different. They’re different. This new clock is a very different look like it’s a little more abstract with the date rotating around instead of a second hand, it’s a lot, and it’s a lot.

And so theoretically, Google is going to finish updating all of their stock app widgets, so that developers can see what they can do with this new functionality.

And to just get the whole look together.

So far, I’m excited just to see what it looks like when it all comes together.

Android 12 Privacy

Now, you might not think of Google and privacy in the same sentence very often.

But seriously, there is a commendable amount of privacy controls here, you have a lot more control in your hands. And I think that’s going to be the keyword that controls.

They added these indicators to the top corner for one, your camera or microphone are being accessed by an app. They’re both green, and they’re in the top right corner.

This is something iOS has been doing for a while that we’re asking for.

Although it might have been cool if they were different colors like an iOS, it’s a little bigger and you get a little icon.

The point is now you immediately known if an app is using your camera or mic. And if you want to change that access is easy.

You swipe down from the top and tap that indicator to go straight into the permissions of whatever app just triggered it then you can take away that access.

Then you also have a couple of optional quick setting buttons you can add, they’re not there by default.

But if you want to add them, you can have a quick setting toggle to immediately turn off camera access or microphone access to everything.

if you’re about to do something or say something for some reason, you don’t want any apps on your phone to have that access to the camera or mic you just flip the switch and it turns it off.

And so, no Apple get access until you enable that again so all that’s nice for peace of mind.

That’s another level above and beyond what we see on the iPhone. So that’s cool.

Then, if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also now a privacy dashboard inside the settings, and that privacy dashboard will show you for your location or care camera or microphone or anything else, an actual timeline laid out of every single app that has access that sensor or that information, and when it did it.

So that’ll make it much easier to see exactly what’s going on. If there are any rogue apps, doing crazy things in the background, killing your battery pinging your location all the time, you better believe it’ll show up here.

And you can just get rid of it straight away. And then lastly, when apps ask for your location, for the first time, there’s a new toggle that will let you select giving them your precise location, or just giving them your approximate location, just the neighborhood you’re in.

That’s pretty useful for maps, for example, I’m of course going to give it my precise location because I want to use it for navigation.

And it just needs to know where I am.

But hey, for any other apps that don’t need to know all that maybe my weather app, or a news app, I still want local news and local weather, but I can choose an approximate location, so they can’t do any weird ad tracking with my exact latitude and longitude.

That’s pretty sweet.

Android 12 Quick Settings

It’s aesthetically very different. Now, it might even be the most aesthetically, like defining feature of Android 12.

Like every preview, you see shows this stuff. But there’s also some new functionality too.

You pull down from the top, and you’ve got these huge toggles that are separated from the notifications area, you can see this to me is interesting, because I remember so much previous Google Talk about getting rid of wasted space and minimizing the blank space.

But now there’s this big clear separation here and think it’s nice. Then when you pull down again, you get this huge brightness slider at the very top.

And these gigantic tiles for whatever you want a quick setting.

It’s, of course, still customizable, like I showed, so you can add or remove toggles. But there’s also a setting shortcut, and a power menu shortcut.

Underneath it all. The Internet selector UI is a little bit different too. when you have a SIM card in your phone, it’s going to show you both Wi-Fi networks and your cell connection in one place, which is nice.

I think it consolidates two buttons into one.

And of course, you also still have ongoing notifications that show up at the top to like if you’re playing music or something unchanged, but it’s going to be at the top with the Quick Settings instead of mixed in with the rest of the notifications.

Generally, though, I think I like this new look, it’s definitely like it’s very different.

It takes some getting used to. But the toggles being way bigger take up more space.

But also, they’re huge touch targets. Now they’re hard to miss, you get the mic access, and the camera access tiles, and the screen recording tile is great.

Android 12 the New Aesthetic Material

That brings us to number one, which is just got to be the whole new look, the new aesthetic material, you just the whole new design here.

If you don’t remember, material design is the sort of guideline that Google’s been using since 2014.

To help developers make their apps look like they were made for Android so that they fit into the look material you with this new aesthetic is a sort of an evolution of that’s a bit more personal, as you can tell by the name.

So obviously things look very different.

There are the big buttons, he talked about the big volume control, slider, and big brightness slider at the top, huge quick settings, toggles.

And even all the text through all the menus and settings is also now larger is the new power button menu, which puts these three huge buttons in a triangle for some reason.

There’s also a new charging animation when you plug in your phone sort of sweeps up from the bottom from the charge port.

There are even more bouncy and friendly-looking animations around all this bigger text.

And this is still in an early beta like I said, so I’m sure stuff will keep getting added over time like the screen on and off animation that they showed on stage at where it would like to emanate out of the power button.

But probably the most noteworthy thing here for the material is the color and style selections that you can make to match it to a theme that you make for your device.

It’s not exactly a whole theme engine.

But now in settings, there is a wallpaper and style section where you can change your wallpaper, you can change the grid size, you can change the style and accent colors of your buttons and your icon shapes, and all of that.

And then materialize you will take the color of Android 12 wallpaper and choose a lock screen clock and quick settings accent colors to match what it thinks will look good with that wallpaper.

Android 12 Yellow Wallpaper, for example, as soon as you said it, it gave me this dark yellow clock for contrast.

And it seems like it typically sticks with lighter kinds of pastel II versions of the primary color or complementary color of the wallpaper.

Since it’s Yellow Wallpaper, I got yellow quick settings.

But when I switch to this mostly blue wallpaper, you can see everything adjust here.

It’s been pretty smart about contrast and everything so far to keep things readable.

But yeah, this is another feature that’s going to continue to evolve into the final version of Android 12 when it comes out later this year, but it’s already a pretty cool touch.

Just making the whole device feel like one cohesive experience with the Android 12.

Change your wallpaper change your life. That’s what I always say.

Now this material use stuff is just on picks.

For now, something to Keep in mind, and this whole Android home experience.

It’s just the way Google is making it on their phone, which is the Pixel.

When you get it on your phone, if it’s a one plus, if it’s a different Samsung, look, it might have a different aesthetic to it.

But you’ll see a lot of the same features and general themes.

So yeah, let me know what you think. Are you a fan of this new change?

It’s a pretty big one. I feel like it, it takes some getting used, I wasn’t as convinced I would like it.

But after using I’ve gotten used to it now with a day of the beta.

I feel like I’ll continue to like it more and more as I use it.

Because if you care about the privacy features that I just showed you, and the latest version of Android 12.

Because even if you are on this latest version, every time you search or watch something, or tweet or do anything from your phone, it’s pretty common for third parties to snoop on that, which is not cool.

Either way, that’s been it. Thanks for reading. Catch you guys in the next one.