Android 13 | What's New?

The new Android 13 is coming to Google pixel phones this summer before trickling out to other flagships and eventually, whichever Android phone you might buy in 2023. Unlike Android 12 there's no big design overhaul this time around instead it's about adding new features on top of the foundations of Android 12. And so what we have here is an OS that looks very similar to the version that launched in 2021 only more capable, more refined, more useful, and more secure. The new Android 13 on the pixel 6 Pro has been here for the past few months so let's take a look at what's new, what's improved, and why this new version of Android might be a bigger deal than you'd think. 

So first the TL;DR. Why should you care about Android 13? Well, Android 13 is a pretty nice tune-up of Android 12 with new features to make notifications less annoying, stop apps from accessing files they don't need, and some handy changes to multilingual users too. It brings support for the next generation of Bluetooth earbuds, plus the clipboard is more useful app icons are more customizable and naturally there are some visual tweaks of pixel devices too. And there's also a pretty big, low-key update to the back gesture that probably won't fully play out until pixel 7. But the most important upgrade of all might be that Android 13 is actually Rock Solid stable. Way more so than Android 12 was. That is good news for anyone with an Android phone but especially anyone looking to pick up one of the new pixels later in the year.

So like the past few releases of Android. Android 13 doesn't have any dessert nickname attached but Google has been a bit Bolder when it comes to sharing the internal code name of Android 13, tiramisu. That's what you see in this little debug icon that Google has alluded to it in a few places on social media as well and the code name was front and center in the earlier Android 13 developer previews. If you're enough of an Android nerd to care about this sort of thing then following from Android 10 queen cake, 11 red velvet cake, and 12 snow cone we have Android 13 tiramisu. Sweet Treats aside the first thing to mention about Android 13 is it's nowhere near as much of a visual overhaul as Android 12 was so if you want to see design changes you'll need to look a little bit closer and because we always see new versions of Android on Pixel phones first it can be a bit tricky to disentangle the new Android design features from something that's just a change in the pixel UI.

So let's jump into the main design changes for Pixel owners in Android 13. One of the most obvious is the redesigned media card which incorporates more of the color of your album art or video thumbnail and uses Google's material U color science to theme the controls around that. You'll notice a neat squiggly line effect when something's playing for a little bit of extra visual flair. Google's gone back and forth on the design of these media cards since they were first introduced but they've landed on something that works pretty well here. Still fits with the style of the rest of the UI while highlighting the art accompanying whatever you're listening to. Material U Google's design language hasn't changed a whole lot in Android 13 but on Pixel phones, you will see more color palettes to choose from with many of the extra Hues contrasting more boldly with your chosen wallpaper. In Android 13 there are up to 16 palette choices for any given wallpaper plus an additional 16 basic color options and many of those are more Vivid than before including new dual-tone options. Android's themed icons are still in beta. But in Android 13 Google's going to be expanding these to more apps hopefully allowing more of your home screens to take on your own individual color palette.

Apps can now provide a basic monochrome version of their icons which can be seen by the system though as with most things in a new version of Android you will need to wait for individual apps to be updated to support this feature. So the dream of a totally themed home screen without any outlying mismatched app icons is a step closer though not quite fully realized for Pixel owners yet. There's another change in the notification Shade that's pretty minor but may mess with your muscle memory if you're a veteran Android User. The power and settings toggles have been relocated down to the bottom of the screen, one of the reasons for this change probably is to make room for the new active apps control which is basically a place to see apps that are actively doing stuff in the background. The most obvious example might be media apps but it's also a place to call out apps that might be gobbling up battery power or data or otherwise misbehaving. If there are any apps running in the background they'll pop up here and there's an easy control to stop them from doing whatever they might be doing.

Search on Pixel phones has been overhauled too. When you search from the App Drawer you can see results from within your installed apps presented alongside web search history and the ability to launch directly into search inside your apps. On-device search has been evolving over the past few versions of Android and the latest redesign looks good. Android 13 Builds on the new animations introduced with pixels on Android 12. Unlocking the phone straight into the launcher now gives you a sort of 3D ripple effect as the icons fade into view and in the settings app when you're hopping between menus this is accompanied by a horizontal swoosh which makes things feel a bit more Dynamic and gives the UI more of a natural flow. Meanwhile down below the gesture area has been bulked up with a thicker line style that makes it look a bit more iPhone-like compared to Android 12 and on pixels, it's now possible to tune your phone's haptics in a couple of new ways with additional sliders for alarm and media vibrations. Plus if you have a preset bedtime setup on your pixel you can tie this into the dark mode setting and automatically switch to a darker color scheme as you get ready for bed.

So that's all the pixel-specific stuff depending on which phone you're using you may or may not see any of that but there's more to Android 13 including things that should benefit every Android phone once it starts rolling out to more devices. There's a new photo picker interface which will also be rolled out to phones on Android 11 and up through Google Play services. This means apps don't need to build this UI for themselves which saves developers time and keeps things consistent and predictable for users. This is also about Android 13's push towards locking down the kinds of media that apps are allowed to access. Just like Android 11 and Android 12 stopped most apps from seeing all of your internal storage. Android 13 splits out photo and audio access into different permissions so a photo editing app will have access to your voice recordings and a music player app will get access to your photos. Worth remembering that with API changes like this apps will need to be updated to Target Android 13 before this change kicks in older apps will still lump media and photos into the same permission.

Speaking of tighter controls on what apps can do, Google's bring the hammer down on app notification access. After updating to Android 13 you'll see a message inviting you to take a look at which apps can send you alerts and whenever you install a new app you'll need to specifically allow it to send you notifications. Apps won't be able to notify you without your explicit consent which is a big important change. There's also a new API for apps to request to add a quick settings tile on most Android phones there's just a massive number of unused tiles to navigate so this more proactive approach in Android 13. Makes a lot more sense. Meanwhile Android is getting easier to use for multilingual folks with the ability to set individual languages for different apps. This could be great if you're learning a new language, if you live abroad, or somewhere where multiple languages are spoken. Not all apps are supported but where you can set it in that specific language you'll find it is just another setting under the app info menu.

One of the more useful shortcuts in Android is the device control menu where you can control Smart Home devices. And it used to be that to be able to use this you had to first unlock your phone in Android 13 you can now tell Android to allow smart home gadgets to be controlled through this menu even without first unlocking your phone. Though once again the app itself like Google home will need to be updated to support this new feature. There are a bunch of changes to the clipboard too though it's not entirely clear if these will carry over to non-pixel phones or not when you copy text it'll appear, it'll pop up down below with a button to let you edit it just like you see when you take a screenshot so you can see whichever app it might have come from and make any changes you want before saving. You might not want to wait too long before pasting what you copy though that's because to improve Security in Android 13 clipboard content is now automatically cleared after 60 minutes.

There are of course a bunch of nerdier under-the-hood changes to touch on in Android 13 so let's quick-fire through them briefly. First Android 13 adds support for Bluetooth LE audio, this is the next Generation audio standard that will be coming soon to new Bluetooth earbuds aimed at reducing power usage while improving latency and bandwidth. In the same way, Bluetooth LE made accessories like smartwatches more battery friendly. Expect a battery and performance boost for earbuds and other personal audio Gear with Le audio and for phones, Android 13 is the first step towards that. There are more modules for Google's Project Mainline feature including Bluetooth and Ultra-wideband which means these parts of the OS can be updated across the Android 13 ecosystem via a Google Play system update. So a full system update isn't needed making it quicker for security fixes and new Bluetooth and uwb features to be rolled out. And Android has its own programmable shader language now making it simpler for developers to incorporate fancy visual effects into their apps.

Text processing isn't the sexiest feature but it's getting better in Android 13 with performance improvements to the way hyphenation is handled deciding where to put that hyphen when text is split between lines is more computationally taxing than you'd think. Finally, let's talk about Android 13's new predictive back gesture. It's a pretty big change to the navigation Paradigm that was added back in Android 10 and it's designed to give you a better idea of what going back is actually going to do for example dumping you out of an app as opposed to just going back one layer within the app. You'll need to enable this in developer options right now and Google says this won't be turned on until after the full launch of Android 13 so think around the time the pixel 7 maybe even then apps will need to be designed to work with this in Android 13 so you probably won't see this behavior in most third-party apps. Instead, you'll see more of it in 2023 with Android 14 with a predictive back gesture will be the default for all Android apps still it's a welcome improvement that helps to take a bit of the unpredictability out of Android's gesture navigation. The most important change in Android 13 compared to the previous version though might be how relatively stable it is versus where Android 12 was last summer. Android 13 has had way fewer show-stopping bugs throughout its development and it's reached all its major Milestones earlier than Android 12 did.

So that's Android 13. It's about laying the groundwork for the future and building on the design trends that were started back in Android 12, as is the case with any version that follows a big UI shakeup. It's not a surprise to see fewer big design changes and instead of focusing on the spattering of features and quality-of-life improvements across the board, there isn't one single Temple feature to point to that's iconically Android 13. But you know that not every version needs that so let us know down in the comments what you think of Android 13 and the big features you're looking forward to. See ya!