What’s New in Android 12 Beta 1!

Alright, so we have spent the past couple of hours with the Android 12 Beta 1 and are ready to start sharing our findings. There are some big changes to be aware of, including a brief preview of the Material You experience that will take over Pixel phones, but a lot of stuff just isn’t here yet. Google is clearly still working on a lot and will likely continue to add features through each beta release.

Big clocks and big buttons.

These few screenshots obviously show some of the Material You design that is incoming. We have the big lock screen clock that shows when you don’t have any notifications, the redesigned notification and quick settings area, and the bigger sliders that will be everywhere. However, we don’t have the color-matching wallpaper experience yet, those sliders aren’t everywhere, and there are no new widgets to show off.

The experience is starting to take shape, we just need to give Google some more time. There are more Android 12 Beta builds on the way, so we’ll try to be patient.

Ripples!

Look at these weird ripples when you touch stuff!

Power can launch Google Assistant!

You can now change the power button so that it fires up Google Assistant when you hold it. Weirdly, the “Cards & passes” and “Device controls” options were supposed to move from here into the quick settings area. They have no yet. Oh, the Back Tap gesture now has an official animation, but it still doesn’t work.

Ok, that’s pretty much it. Here are the things Google said should be here that aren’t:

• Scrolling screenshots are official, but they don’t work.
• There is a new Privacy dashboard with all the privacy controls, but I can’t find it yet (Coming in beta 2).
• Location permissions now give you options to get precise or approximate, but they aren’t here yet.
• A new indicator will tell you if an app uses your camera or mic, but it’s not live yet (Coming in beta 2).
• Again, no new widgets are here just yet except for the Conversations widget  that showed up a couple of previews back.

This is what some of the new stuff will look like:

Y’all finding anything else? If we do, we’ll update this post.