Android 15 Developer Preview has just been released by the Android team with features including partial screen sharing and the latest version of the Privacy Sandbox.

In a blog post announcing the release, Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Google Android, said:

"Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity while giving you new capabilities to produce superior media experiences, minimize battery impact, maximize smooth app performance, and protect user privacy and security all on the most diverse lineup of devices out there."

In more practical terms, the first enhancement is the inclusion of the latest version of the Privacy Sandbox on Android. This brings Android AD Services up to extension level 10, which the Android team says is part of its work to develop new technologies that improve user privacy and enable effective, personalized advertising experiences for mobile apps. 

Android 15 also integrates the Health Connect by Android extensions. This is a centralized platform to manage and share app-collected health and fitness data. This update adds support for new data types for fitness and nutrition.

The FileIntegrityManager has been updated with new APIs that use the fs-verity feature in the Linux kernel. This means files can be protected by custom cryptographic signatures.

Partial screen sharing has been added to the new release, so users can share or record just an app window rather than the entire device screen. For developers, there are new MediaProjection callbacks that can be used in apps to customize the partial screen sharing experience.

Android 15 adds new extensions that provide more control over the camera hardware and its algorithms, including new low light enhancements that mean developers can boost the brightness of the camera preview; and flash strength adjustments that can be used to control flash intensity in both single and torch modes while capturing images.

Support has also been added for virtual MIDI 2.0 devices. Support for connecting to MIDI 2.0 devices via USB has been available since Android 13 using Universal MIDI Packets (UMP). Android 15 extends UMP support to virtual MIDI apps, so apps can control synthesizer apps as a virtual MIDI 2.0 device just like they would with an USB MIDI 2.0 device.

The new version has updated versions of the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF), a set of APIs that allow games and performance intensive apps to interact more directly with power and thermal systems of Android devices. ADPF now has a power-efficiency mode for hint sessions to indicate that their associated threads should prefer power saving over performance; and GPU and CPU work durations can both be reported in hint sessions, allowing the system to adjust CPU and GPU frequencies together to best meet workload demands.

Finally, there are more OpenJDK APIs, including quality-of-life improvements around NIO buffers, streams and security.

Android 15 Developer Preview is available now.

• Mike James is both editor-in-chief of IProgrammer and a prolific author. His Android titles include Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App, a book that shows how common tasks are done in Android Studio 3 using Kotlin, pointing out where necessary how this differs from the Java approach.

More Information

Android 15 Developer Site

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