Google releases Android 12L Beta 1 for Google Pixel phones

Google has started rolling out the first beta update of its Android 12L operating system to Pixel smartphones. The update was announced at the company’s annual Android Developer Summit earlier this year. Android 12L comes with small tweaks and is termed as a ‘feature drop’ for foldables, tablets and devices that work on ChromeOS.
Android 12L brings a two-column layout for devices with big screens like foldable phones and tablets. This offers more information to the device users at once. Users will also be able to switch between apps quickly like on a desktop computer. They will also be able to drag an app from the taskbar to use it during the split-screen mode.
Google says that Android 12L Beta will be available on supported Pixel devices. The list includes Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5 and Pixel 5a. In case you do not own a pixel phone or you own one but don’t want to wait, you can run Android 12L Beta in an emulator. The update is already available on the Android Emulator as a part of Android Studio.
Android 12L: More features
New APIs in 12L will allow apps to show multiple activities at once through Activity embedding. For example, it will allow users to open a Google Drive folder on the left side and maybe a PDF preview on the right, or two Google Docs documents side-by-side. Google also looks forward to encouraging app development on larger screens. There are new tools, APIs, and guides that will help developers to create adaptive apps that are compatible with any display. Google is promoting a TwoPane view aimed at foldables, like the one that is displayed above in Google Messages.
Google will also alert users about the apps that aren’t optimised for large screens (if they have a list from a big-screen device) in the play store. There will be new criteria to assess the app quality of each app against Google’s large screen app quality guidelines. Moreover, there will be large screen-specific app ratings and these changes will be released in 2022.