At its Google I/O event on Wednesday, Google released the second beta of Android 13. The search giant highlighted several new aspects to Android 13 including better privacy controls that help users to limit what data apps have access to, an improved Material You theme system that works across more apps, a new Settings & Privacy page that can help you boost your security, swanky music controls that adjust their look based on the music you’re listening to, and the ability to change the language of each app – something that music be quite handy if you are bilingual and prefer certain apps in a particular language.
You can really tell we’ve hit a fairly stable feature ceiling for mobile operating systems. New releases don’t really rock the boat anymore, and there’s rarely any major, tent pole features that you’ll miss out on.
Still, updates are updates, and they come with more than just new features – security fixes are reason enough phone makers should be forced to support phones with full Android version updates for at least five years, preferably longer.
“New releases don’t really rock the boat anymore, and there’s rarely any major, tent pole features that you’ll miss out on.”
In my opinion, the biggest feature that users miss out on and will notice is any new emojis. That means texts from iPhone users, texts from people with newer installations of Android, emails, websites, any app that will show emojis, there’s a good chance the person with the older version of Android will just get a white square with an X in it.
Oh my goodness I get so angry every time I remember Google decided to tie emoji version to the installed operating system and not, you know, just make it another package that anyone can install and update. Fortunately I can use Magisk on my phone to update them manually.