Features of Android - 13

Themed app icons :

Android 13 extends Material You dynamic color to all app icons, letting users opt-in to icons that inherit the tint of their wallpaper and other theme preferences. All your app needs to supply is a monochromatic app icon and a tweak to the adaptive icon XML.

Themed app icons adapting to wallpapers colors and dark theme (left).

Per-app language preferences :

 Android 13 makes it easier to support multilingual users who want to use your apps in a language that’s different from the system language. Android now provides a standard “App language” Settings panel for apps that have opted-in, and you can call a new platform API to get or set the user’s preferred locale at runtime, helping to reduce boilerplate code and improve compatibility.

Per-app languages in Settings

Improved text support :

 Android 13 includes text and language improvements that help you deliver a more polished experience. Faster hyphenation optimizes hyphenation performance by as much as 200% so you can now enable it in your TextViews with almost no impact on rendering performance. Text conversion APIs make searching and autocompletion faster when using phonetic lettering input for languages like Japanese, Chinese, and others. Android 13 also improves line heights for non-latin scripts (such as Tamil, Burmese, Telugu, and Tibetan), eliminating clipping and making them easier to read.

Improved line height for non-Latin scripts in apps targeting Android 13 (bottom).

Color vector fonts :

 Android 13 adds rendering support for COLR version 1 (spec, intro video) fonts and updates the system emoji to the COLRv1 format. COLRv1 is a new, highly compact, font format that renders quickly and crisply at any size. For most apps this will just work, and the system handles everything.

COLRv1 vector emoji (left) and bitmap emoji.

Quick Settings Placement API :

For apps that provide custom Quick Settings tiles, Android 13 makes it easier for users to discover and add your tiles. Using a new tile placement API, your app can now prompt the user to directly add your custom Quick Settings tile in a single step, without leaving your app.

Programmable shaders :

Android 13 introduces programmable RuntimeShader objects, with behavior defined using the Android Graphics Shading Language (AGSL). You can use these shaders to create ripple, blur, stretch, and similar advanced effects in your apps.

Media controls derived from PlaybackState:

 For apps targeting Android 13, the system now derives media controls from PlaybackState actions, providing a richer set of controls that are consistent across phones and tablet devices and align with other Android platforms such as Android Auto and Android TV.

Android 13 media controls are consistent on phones and tablets.

Bluetooth LE Audio:

 Low Energy (LE) Audio is the next-generation wireless audio built to enable new use cases like sharing and broadcasting audio to friends and family, or subscribing to public broadcasts for information, entertainment, or accessibility. It’s designed to ensure that users can receive high fidelity audio without sacrificing battery life, and lets them seamlessly switch between different use cases. Android 13 adds built-in support for LE Audio, so developers can use the new capabilities on compatible devices.

MIDI 2.0 - Android 13 adds support for the new MIDI 2.0 standard, including the ability to connect MIDI 2.0 hardware through USB. This updated standard offers features such as increased resolution for controllers, better support for non-Western intonation, and more expressive performance using per-note controllers.

OpenJDK 11 updates :

 Android 13 Core Libraries now align with the OpenJDK 11 LTS release, with both library updates and Java 11 programming language support for app and platform developers. We plan to bring these Core Library changes to more devices through Google Play system updates, as part of an ART module update for devices running Android 12 and higher.

Predictive back gesture - Android 13 introduces new APIs that let your app tell the system that it will handle back events in advance, a practice we call the "ahead-of-time" model. This new approach is part of a multi-year effort to help you prepare your app to support the predictive back gesture, which is available for testing in this release through a developer option.

Built for tablets

Android 13 extends the 12L update that we released earlier this year, and it delivers an even better experience on tablets. You’ll find features like an enhanced multitasking taskbar, more large-screen layouts and optimizations in system UI and apps, improved compatibility modes for apps, and more. We’re continuing to invest to give you the tools you need to build great experiences for tablets as well as Chromebooks and foldables. You can learn more about how to get started optimizing for large screens, and be sure to check out our large screens developer resources.

Multitasking on tablets with Android 13.

Privacy and security

Photo picker and APIs - A new system photo picker now gives users a standard, privacy-protecting way to share local and cloud-based photos. Photo picker extends Android’s long-standing document picker and makes it easy for users to share specific photos and videos with an app, without giving the app permission to view all media files on the device. Photo picker provides a dedicated experience for photos and videos and includes APIs for apps to access the shared media files. The photo picker experience is now available to users who receive Google Play system updates, on devices (excepting Go devices) running Android 11 and higher.

Photo picker lets users share specific photos and videos with an app.

Notification permission - To help users focus on the notifications that are most important to them, Android 13 introduces a new notifications runtime permission. Apps now need to request the notification permission from the user before posting notifications. For apps targeting Android 12 or lower, the system will handle the upgrade flow on your behalf.

Notification permission dialog in Android 13.

Nearby device permission for Wi-Fi - Android 13 introduces the NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES runtime permission for apps that manage a device's connections to nearby access points over Wi-Fi. The new permission is required for many commonly-used Wi-Fi APIs and enables apps to discover and connect to nearby devices over Wi-Fi without also needing to acquire the location permission. 

Granular permissions for media file access :

 Photo picker is our recommended solution for user-friendly, permissionless sharing of photos and videos, but for apps that haven’t moved to photo picker yet or for audio use cases, Android 13 adds new granular media permissions. These new permissions replace the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission and provide access to specific types of media files, including images, video, or audio. We highly recommend moving your app to photo picker if possible; otherwise, use the granular media permissions when targeting Android 13.

Requesting permission to access audio files.

Developer downgradable permissions :

 Starting in Android 13, apps that no longer require permissions previously granted by the user can use a new API to downgrade the permissions. By removing unused permissions, your app can show that it’s using the minimum permissions needed, which can improve user trust.

Safer exported Intent filters - Android 13 applies stricter rules when delivering explicit intents to exported intent filters in another app that’s targeting Android 13. For intents that specify actions, the system now delivers the intents to the exported component only if the intent matches the receiver’s declared <intent-filter> elements. 

Performance for apps:

Android 13 improves performance and efficiency for all apps through updates to the ART runtime. We plan to bring these improvements to more Android users through Google Play system updates, as part of our ongoing ART module updates for devices running Android 12 and higher.

Improved garbage collection - A new garbage collector based on the Linux kernel feature userfaultfd is coming to ART on Android 13 devices in an upcoming Google Play system update. The new garbage collector eliminates the read barrier and its fixed overhead per object loaded, reducing memory pressure and leading to as much as ~10% reduction in compiled code size. It’s more efficient at GC-time as well, since pages are freed as compaction progresses. Overall, the new garbage collector helps to save battery, avoid jank during GC operations, and protect apps from low-memory kills.

Optimizations throughout ART - In Android 13, ART makes switching to and from native code much faster, with JNI calls now up to 2.5x faster. We’ve also reworked the runtime’s reference processing to make it mostly non-blocking, which further reduces jank. We’ve exposed a new public API, Reference.refersTo(), which is useful in reclaiming unreachable objects sooner, and we’ve made the interpreter faster by optimizing class/method lookups. Lastly, ART now performs more byte-code verification at install time, avoiding the expense of verification at runtime and keeping app startup times fast.