Google has released the first beta for Android 16, arriving more than two months after Android 15’s official release. As expected, the beta is rolling out to Pixel devices enrolled in the Android Beta Program. It introduces new features and improvements that may make it to the final release of Android 16 later this year.
One notable change is the removal of the ability for apps (excluding games) to restrict screen orientation and resizability on larger displays.
↫ David Uzondu at Neowin
Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It’s still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some things might not make it to the final release at all.
Reviewers of Android tablets always bang on about “Android apps aren’t designed for tablets and look bad on them compared to iOS” and yet in my many years as a user of a lot of Android tablets, there is literally only one issue I’ve come across that’s bugged me and it’s mentioned in this article.
Yep, it’s the lazy ass developers not supporting landscape mode on a tablet and forcing it to portrait – they can’t be bothered handling the different width/height dimensions and there is no other reason than laziness as far as I can tell. I just wish Google had done this a decade or more earlier! BTW, will this result in portrait-forcing apps looking badly laid out or stretched out in landscape mode? My Chromebook has a workaround in ChromeOS when displaying Android portrait-forcing apps – it displays them in a vertical window, which sometimes I wished Android tablets would do too…