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Android 16’s beta program is now live! Google has released the first of four beta versions, packed with exciting features like improved app adaptivity, Live Updates, and APV compatibility. Users can install Beta 1 over the air to explore the most important Android release of the year. Here’s what the first beta offers.
Android 16 Beta 1: What’s New?
The most interest lies in the user-facing features of Android 16 Beta 1, so the developer modifications outlined in Google’s announcement will be grouped alongside these visible features. Many of these changes, while user-focused, hold significant importance for developers and warrant careful attention throughout the article.
Enhanced app flexibility
Lots of great Android apps have been responsively designed to work better on bigger screens, but there are still a tonne of apps that aren’t. Developers must invest time, energy, and resources into their apps with great care if they want them to seem good on devices with huge screens. The vast majority of app developers don’t even bother to make their programs responsive for big screens because smartphones outnumber tablets, Chromebooks, and book-style foldables.
Developer constraints may cause certain apps to appear weird on these huge screen devices, but they still operate well elsewhere. For instance, a lot of developers don’t allow users to rotate their apps; they only support portrait orientation. An update to Android 14 QPR1 made it feasible to bypass this limitation, although Google is planning to implement a different fix for Android 16.
Apps can no longer limit screen orientation and resizability on big screens as of Android 16. This is comparable to capabilities that a number of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have introduced in the past few years that enable users to run applications with customizable window sizes and aspect ratios.
Android 16 apps, regardless of their manifest properties, will be resizable on devices with large screens. Google suggests that developers make use of flexible layouts and test how their apps react to different screen sizes. Except for games, this change will take effect with the release of Android 17 next year, as Google will eliminate the opt-out feature at that point. All other apps should prepare for this change to go live.
Current Events
A new kind of notification called Live Updates is being introduced in Android 16. An incoming rideshare pickup, a food delivery alert, navigation, and other critical ongoing operations are all designed to be communicated through Live Updates. Android 16 makes sure these notifications don’t get lost among other, less urgent alerts by displaying them prominently on the lock screen.
The Live Updates feature on Android is quite similar to the Live Activities feature on iOS. The feature’s purpose remains unchanged regardless of its location on the lock screen. It’s great that Google is finally implementing this, as other OEMs such as OnePlus and Samsung have just done the same thing. While the new Samsung Galaxy S25 features a scrollable Now Bar, OnePlus’ Live Alerts has certain advantages over the iPhone’s Dynamic Island. While Android 16’s Live Updates feature might address this issue, neither solution currently supports notifications from many third-party apps.
