Electronics Weekly
Note this release is for developers only, available on Pixel devices – the Android 16 Developer Preview releases are early baseline builds for programmers only, not for early adopters.
The Android 16 system is planned to launch in “Q2” of this year – you can see a timeline further below. At this relatively late stage in the dev cycle, there are only a few new features in the Android 16 Beta 3 release.
Broadcast audio
In terms of changes for audio, Pixel 9 devices on Android 16 Beta will now support Auracast broadcast audio with compatible LE Audio hearing aids.
This is to improve Android audio accessibility. Built on the Bluetooth LE Audio standard, Auracast enables compatible hearing aids and earbuds to receive direct audio streams from public. For example, airports, concerts, and classrooms.
Outline text
Another new feature is support for outlining text to maximise text contrast, for example over videos.
Google writes:
“Users with low vision often have reduced contrast sensitivity, making it challenging to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. To help these users, Android 16 Beta 3 introduces outline text, replacing high contrast text, which draws a larger contrasting area around text to greatly improve legibility.”
This is easily seen in the picture above. It shows text with enhanced contrast, before and after the outline text feature.
Milestones
The Platform Stability milestone, which is now, reached is intended to help with final testing and releases.
It means the API surface is locked, the app-facing behaviors are final, and in theory you can push your Android 16-targeted apps to the Play store.
The release of Android 15 was completed in the autumn.
