With Google issuing the final beta of Android 13 recently, I decided to finally update my Pixel 6 Pro and see what’s new. It’s not much.

I would have done this sooner, but we were on a connectivity-challenged Alaska cruise for the past week, and our trip began the same day that Google issued the beta. (The connectivity was so bad I couldn’t even backup my photos during the cruise, or watch a single online video.)

Somewhat related, I’ve been using an iPhone 13 Pro this year for reasons outlined elsewhere. And between that and my understanding of the meager changes coming in this release, installing the beta seemed less of a priority. But once we got back to Seattle and what I’ll call a more normal connectivity experience, I decided to go for it.

And I’m not sure I’d have even noticed if someone had secretly updated the phone when I wasn’t looking. There just isn’t much to report. Whether that’s good or bad is partially a matter of perspective, I guess. But Apple is delivering a major upgrade this year in iOS 16—which I wrote about here and here—and Google is not with Android 13.

I sort of knew this would be the case because I’ve written about each pre-release milestone in turn. Google issued the first Android 13 developer preview (DP1) in February, and it followed that up with DP2 in March, Beta 1 in April, Beta 2 in May at Google I/O, Beta 3 with “platform stability” in May, several Beta 3 updates, and then  Beta 4 in July. And you don’t need to waste time combing through the new features in each release, because I’ve done it for you. Again, there’s not much.

The biggest visual change, sort of, is the expansion of Google’s Material You-themed monochrome icons to third-party apps. I didn’t use this option with Android 12 because only Google’s apps supported it, leading to a weird mishmash of monochrome and full-color icons. But this expansion means little today, since so few third-party apps support it.

The result is similar to what we saw before, but that could/should change over time as app makers move to support this (admittedly polarizing but at least optional) icon style. (Why Android can’t automatically auto-monochrome non-conformant app icons is unclear given Google’s AI prowess.)

Other changes are even less dramatic. Android 13 will support Bluetooth LE Audio, which is nice, and it will have new notification permissions, a new photo picker, per-app language support, and more granular file access permissions.

“Instead of permitting access to ‘Files and media,’ there are two new categories you can control access to, ‘Photos & videos’ and ‘Music & audio,’” Google’s Trystan Upstill explained of that last feature at I/O. “For even more specificity, a new photo picker lets you select the exact photos or videos you want to grant access to, without needing to share your entire media library with an app.”

And that is about all I know about and/or have noticed. But I’ll need to actually use it out in the world, and I’ll try to do so this coming week.

Tagged with Android 13