Google has announced several new features for Android devices that promises to improve privacy, beef up security and help you personalise your phone to adapt to your lifestyle.
Privacy and security
Android 12 includes new features that give you more transparency around which apps are accessing your data, thus more control. This makes it easier for users to make informed choices about how much private information your apps can access.
Android 12 will have a Privacy Dashboard that will give you a single view into your permissions settings and allow you to check what data is being accessed, how often and by which apps. In addition to that, it lets you revoke app permissions right from the dashboard.
There will also be a new indicator to the top right of your status bar so you know when your apps are accessing your microphone or camera. If you want to remove app access to these sensors for the entire system, there will be two new toggles in Quick Settings.
Users will have much more control over how much information that is shared with apps. With new approximate location permissions, apps can be limited to seeing just your approximate location instead of a precise one.
In this release, Google will introduce Android Private Compute Core. This will essentially allow Google to introduce new technologies that are private by design. The company assured that users’ personal information will be kept safe, private and local to your phone.
Private Compute Core enables features like Live Caption, Now Playing and Smart Reply. All the audio and language processing happens on-device, isolated from the network to preserve your privacy. Like the rest of Android, the protections in Private Compute Core are open source and fully inspectable and verifiable by the security community.
Personalisation
With Android 12, users will soon be able to completely personalise the phone with a custom colour palette and redesigned widgets.
Using what Google calls colour extraction, users can choose their wallpaper and the system automatically determines which colours are dominant and which ones are complementary. It will then apply these colours across the entire OS.
Battery
The Android devices will be faster and more responsive with better power efficiency. Improvements were done that reduced the CPU time needed for core system services by up to 22% as well as reducing the use of big cores by the system server by up to 15%.
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