Android 12 Developer Preview Hands-on: the Best Is Yet to Come

The first developer preview of Android 12 has arrived, and with it, a myriad of minor visual tweaks and development tools. As is always the case with developer previews, this build is mostly intended to give software developers a base platform on which to prep their apps and services, ensuring a smooth transition when Google eventually rolls out the official public-facing build.

This build isn't intended for daily use, and you absolutely should not install it on your primary phone, but if you have a spare device sitting around, the good news is that you don't need one of the best Android phones to run it — this initial developer preview is available for the Pixel 3 series and all subsequent models. With that in mind, I flashed the build onto my Pixel 5 to see how it differs from Android 11.

Under the hood

Especially this early on, most of the changes introduced with Android 12 are happening behind the scenes, and you may never even notice them. Android 12 is introducing a new unified API for receiving content, which will make it easier and more consistent to be able to copy and paste text, images, and videos between apps.

Android 12 is also introducing support for AVIF, a new image format that significantly improves image quality without increasing file sizes, and can automatically transcore HEVC and HDR video files to the more widely compatible AVC format.

Additionally, there are quite a few security-focused and behavioral changes brought on with Android 12 — we'll be doing a deep dive on those shortly.

Redesigned notification shade

While Android 12's general UI looks largely unchanged from that of Android 11, one of the most notable differences is the redesigned notification shade. App icons on the left side of incoming notifications are uniformly circular now, and there's a new dedicated snooze button in the bottom right corner of notifications from apps like Gmail. Considering how inconspicuous the half-swipe action for snoozing notifications was previously, this is a welcome change — though you can still access the snooze menu this way, as well.

The opacity of background elements behind notifications is slightly changed as well, and there's considerably more spacing between text, making each notification bigger than before. Text is also now indented a bit to the left of the notification icon, as are the actionable buttons beneath the notification text. The whole look is a bit more crowded than before, but it calls more attention to each individual notification.