Image via Google
Google has just announced that the third beta of Android 12 is available for download, and it looks set to be the company’s biggest OS release in a few years.
The first beta introduced some major design changes, like new animations. Then, a privacy dashboard and updated WiFi UX came in the second. Now, in the freshly released third beta,
three major changes are: scrolling screenshots, improved auto-rotate using face detection, and AppSearch.
Arguably the most anticipated feature, scrolling screenshots will allow users to find a ‘Capture More’ button in the tray of a regular screenshot. This captures a singular long screenshot of a page rather than multiple, each limited to the screen size of the phone. Users can then adjust the crop however they’d like.
In a blog post, the team details that it will still be working on this feature for the fourth beta. This will offer more support to the new feature, such as scrolling ListViews and WebViews.
Auto-rotate will also become smarter and faster, using the front camera to increase the accuracy of the rotate being trigger. This means less accidental rotations when you’re lying down or reclining (or when you accidentally drop your phone on your face). The images make use of the Private Compute Core, so the images captured by the camera remain solely on the device.
And last but not least, AppSearch, the new
on-device search engine, is rolling out. The developers state that “apps can index structured data and search over it with built-in full-text search capabilities.” It’s available with multi-language support and two “flavors”: a local index, and central index.
According to the release notes, Beta 3 can be accessed through the
Android developer website and downloaded onto Pixel 3, 3a, 4, 4a, or 5 devices.
[via
9to5Google, image via
Google]