The first beta of Android 17 is now available, and it includes a change in the way the Android development team shares new Android releases with developers.
The new Continuous Canary channel now replaces the traditional Developer Testing model, giving developers access to features and APIs as soon as they pass testing instead of waiting for quarterly releases.
Other advantages of the Canary channel are that beta releases are stable, OTA updates are supported, and it provides easy integration with CI workflows.
As for what’s new in Android 17, developers should be aware that the out-of-shape and resizing restrictions on large-screen devices will be removed in this release. Several attributes and APIs will be ignored when the application is running on a large screen, including resizableActivity, minAspectRatio, and maxAspectRatio, as well as some values of screenOrientation and setRequestedOrientation().
“When your app targets SDK 37, it must be ready to adapt. Users expect their apps to work everywhere—whether multitasking on a tablet, unlocking a device, or using a desktop window space—and they expect the UI to fill the space and respect the orientation of their device,” the Android team wrote in a blog post.
These changes will not work on screens below 600dp or in applications classified as games. Users can also opt in or out of using the app’s default behavior in the device’s aspect ratio settings.
A related change is that the default behavior of the animation Task is updated, and Android will no longer be able to restart tasks for configuration changes that do not require UI animation, and will instead receive those updates via onConfigurationChanged.
Performance updates include an unlocked MessageQueue, garbage collection generated from ART’s Concurrent Mark-Compact collector, removal of the ability to change static storage fields, size limits on custom notification views, and new system triggers in the ProfilingManager for better debugging.
Android 17 will also introduce updates to all media and camera apps, such as support for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, the ability to require metadata from multiple cameras, and improved background sound.
Other updates include the removal of the CleartextTraffic attribute, integrated HPKE cryptography, improved VoIP call history, and Wi-Fi Ranging proximity detection.
And finally, for developers, the team added two new profiles to the CompanionDeviceManager. The Medical Device Profile allows medical apps to request all necessary permissions with a single command, and the Fitness Trackers profile allows compatible apps to clearly indicate that they own a fitness tracker.
The Android development team says that the platform stability of this version is planned for March, and Android 17 will receive the release of a large SDK with behavior changes for breaking the application in Q2 and a small SDK with APIs and features in Q4 of this year.
