The first beta of Android 17 is now available, and it features a change in how the Android development team shares new releases of Android to developers.
A new continuous Canary channel now replaces the traditional Developer Preview model, providing developers access to features and APIs as soon as they pass testing instead of waiting for quarterly releases.
Other benefits of the Canary channel are that beta releases are more stable, OTA updates are supported, and it offers easier integration with CI workflows.
As for what’s new in Android 17, developers should be aware that the opt-out for orientation and resizability restrictions on large screen devices will be removed in this release. Several attributes and APIs will be ignored when an app 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, unfolding a device, or using a desktop windowing environment—and they expect the UI to fill the space and respect their device posture,” the Android team wrote in a blog post.
These changes will not apply to screens smaller than 600dp or to apps categorized as games. Users can also opt-in or opt-out of using an app’s default behavior in the device’s aspect ratio settings.
A related change is that the default behavior for Activity recreation is being updated, and Android will no longer restart activities for configuration changes that don’t require a UI recreation, and will instead receive those updates through onConfigurationChanged.
Performance updates include a lock-free MessageQueue, generational garbage collection in ART’s Concurrent Mark-Compact collector, removal of the ability to modify static final fields, size restrictions on custom notification views, and new system triggers in ProfilingManager for better debugging.
Android 17 will also introduce updates across media and camera apps, such as support for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, the ability to require metadata from multiple cameras, and background audio hardening.
Other updates include deprecation of the CleartextTraffic attribute, HPKE hybrid cryptography, enhanced VoIP call history, and proximity detecting for Wi-Fi Ranging.
And finally, for developers, the team has added two new profiles to the CompanionDeviceManager. The Medical Devices profile allows medical apps to request all necessary permissions with a single prompt, and the Fitness Trackers profile allows companion apps to clearly show that they are managing a fitness tracker.
The Android development team says that platform stability for this version is planned for March, and then Android 17 will receive a major SDK release with app breaking behavior changes in Q2 and a minor SDK with additional APIs and features in Q4 of this year.