Android 15 Beta 1 is now available for Pixel smartphones

Since February, we’ve been telling you about all the great new features in the Android 15 developer preview, and today we’ve reached an important milestone with the release of the first beta. This means the developer preview is complete and Android 15 is ready for public testing.

If you have the latest Pixel device, try Android 15 today. Android 15 is still buggy and unreliable, so we recommend doing this only if your Pixel device isn’t your primary phone. Either way, if you have one of the following Pixels, you can use Android 15.

Unfortunately, if you have a Pixel device that isn’t on that list, it won’t run on Android 15. If you have a supported device and are ready to give it a try, read our instructions on how to install Android 15.

What’s new in Android 15 Beta 1

As we’ve said several times over the past few months, Android 15 isn’t a major system refresh. It looks and feels very similar to Android 14. However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t include new and exciting features. Here are some highlights included in this first beta.

In fact, we leaked information about app archiving in Android 15 back in March. This new tool lets you archive apps directly from within Android. Go to the list of apps in Android settings and there[アーカイブ]Just press the button. This will remove most of the data associated with that app, but will leave your personal data intact. If you want to have that app back on your system, just restore it from the same settings page. This will re-download any missing app data and restore the app to the same state it was in before it was archived.

Essentially, this is a tool that adds a nice middle ground between keeping an app installed or uninstalling it completely. If you uninstall and reinstall the app, you will lose a lot of data, including saved login information. But it’s not an archive issue, so this is a great new tool.

If this tool looks familiar, it’s because you can already do it automatically through the Play Store. However, the main difference is that this is manual and built into Android itself.

Edge-to-edge app support is another point Google shared before officially rolling it out. Currently, developers creating apps that target Android 14 and earlier can choose to have their apps fill the entire display. Then it will look like the image on the right above. Otherwise, it will look like the image on the left.

However, apps targeting Android 15 will automatically fill the entire screen whether the developer chooses to do so or not. It may take some time, but eventually all your major apps will look like the image to the right, giving Android a unified look that takes full advantage of the entire display.

Braille support

TalkBack — Android’s suite of accessibility tools — now supports a variety of braille displays. This is a great change to make the device easier to use for people with visual impairments.

Other changes

• Alignment between characters: This change is to improve the display of languages ​​that use character spacing for splitting, such as Chinese and Japanese.
• App management profiling: new ProfilingManager This class allows developers to collect certain types of information from users in a simpler and more performance-friendly way.
• Key management for E2EE: This is a bit technical, but the result is that users can use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for their contact keys. This allows you to securely manage and view other people’s contact information.
• A secure background activity will start. Android 10 first introduced restrictions on launching background activities. This prevents malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground and using them to attack users. Android 15 makes this feature even better.

There are many other things to see!

Above are the new items announced by Google for Android 15 Beta 1. However, Google rarely publishes other changes. You’ll definitely find more in the first beta, so stay tuned in the next 24 hours.