At the Google for Games Developer Summit, Google officially announced the availability of Play Games for PC for beta testers in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Google also announced that Play as you Download will be expanding to more devices running Android 12. Under the hood, it uses the new Incremental File System to let users enter games while assets are being downloaded in the background.
To boost mobile game dev, Google announced the Google Play Partner Program which provides tools and resources for large-scale game studios, AGDE cross-compat between Android Studio and Visual Studio, ...
... the new Memory Advice API in the AGDK, expanded availability of the Android GPU Inspector Frame Profiler, and new views in the Play Console to see revenue growth in Google Play.
Oh wow, the long awaited Steam support has finally been announced for Chrome OS!
So the "early, alpha-quality version of Steam on Chrome OS" is coming to select Chromebooks in the Dev channel *soon*. It hasn't actually launched yet.
Here's everything I found in Android 13 Developer Preview 2 (thread)
The settings and power menu buttons have been moved to the bottom of the notifications shade.
There's a new foreground service manager that shows apps running in the foreground. Whenever there's a foreground app, you'll see text at the bottom of the notification shade that shows the # of active apps. Tap that and a dialog appears, showing which apps.
Google has just announced Android 13 Developer Preview 2! Here's what they mentioned in their blog post 👇(thread)
Like I mentioned before, there's a new runtime permission for notifications. Apps targeting Android 13 will need the POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission before they can send notifications.
Speaking of permissions, apps that no longer need certain runtime permissions can self-revoke them.
Bad USB cables are frequently behind Android Auto issues, so in the latest version of the Android Auto app (7.5.121104), Google's adding a USB Startup Diagnostics tool.
The tool checks if Android is able to send data through USB, which might not be possible if the cable is connected to the wrong port in the car, the cable is incompatible/damaged, or the phone's USB port is damaged.
Let me know if this diagnostic tool shows up for you!
Curious to see if 3P camera apps using CameraX like @GrapheneOS's Secure Camera can now implement Night Sight. Google doesn't list the Pixels as having any vendor extensions available, so Night Sight may be their first one?
The Android tablet market has been in such a sorry state for years that the best advice I could give to anyone wanting a tablet is to just get an iPad.
That's why I'm hoping @richminer's team succeeds at making the tablet UX better.
(Image via LTT )
Even the cheapest iPad is too expensive for many people, which is why budget Android tablets are still stupidly popular. The pandemic definitely helped to boost their sales, what with the increase in WFH and remote learning.
Samsung makes some REALLY great tablets (and tablet software), but they can't carry the entire ecosystem on their backs. They don't control AOSP, CDD, Google Play, etc. Everything they do makes their tablets better, leaving everyone else to figure things out on their own.