Android 13 preview locks notifications, adds more to the tablet taskbar

Android 13 Developer Preview 2 is out, and with it comes a lot of changes for the next version of Android. Preview 2 is still a very early look at Android 13, and most of the big feature reveals for these Android previews come during Google I/O. The good news is that Google has just set a date for that event: May 11-12.

First, if you’re disappointed with the relatively tame tablet changes that Android 12L has brought about, know that Google is still working on tablet features. The latest Android 13 preview adds an app drawer button to the taskbar so you can easily access all your apps from any screen. It’s a great addition, and hopefully it’s a sign of things to come for the brand new taskbar added in Android 12L.

Next, it would be great if the Android taskbar worked more like a Windows or Mac taskbar. The Android taskbar shows the bottom row of icons on the home screen, and that’s it. Instead, it should show pinned apps on one side and recently opened apps on the other. Other operating systems work that way because it makes sense. Google officially calls this a “Taskbar”, so shouldn’t current tasks appear in it?

As usual, there’s a lot going on with the notification shade. Login notifications are live, so any app will now prompt for notification permissions on first launch. As someone who never wants to hear a notification from 90 percent of the apps, it is very satisfying to preemptively ban most notifications.

The settings (and power button) have been moved to the bottom of the quick settings panel and a new “active app” tracker lives there too. If you click on it, you can see everything running in the background. Google actually calls this “running apps” button the “Foreground Services (FGS) Task Manager.”

The special media notification introduced in Android 11 has been completely redesigned. Instead of showing the album art in a thumbnail, the art now covers the entire background of the notification. The media notification can no longer be collapsed and is not always the height of two notifications. Removing the double height notification and thumbnail leaves a lot more room for controls, and you now see a lot more text, a search bar, and “previous” and “next” buttons.

One problem with the media player is that some music apps don’t pass high-resolution images to the media notification. The apps expect the art to be displayed in a small thumbnail, so it’s low resolution. Blowing up the file to a full-width background image usually looks awful.

One of the coolest new features for split screen addicts is the ability to drag an app from the notification shade into split screen mode. Just long press a notification and start moving your finger. The notification shade will collapse and split screen mode will be activated. The only problem is that you can’t do this action with the media player yet because it creates weird custom system notifications.

Google has something wild planned for Android’s largely ignored screensaver functionality. Amazon Fire tablets can plug into a charging dock and become an Alexa smart display, and it looks like Google wants to do something similar with the Google Assistant. The feature isn’t live yet, but Esper’s Mishaal Rahman has seen code for “complications” that can be run in screen saver mode. You can display information such as the weather, air quality, date and time, which is much like a smart display function.

Android 13 has already made some visible improvements to the screensaver’s settings, such as new options to display a rainbow animation or photos from Google Photos. Elsewhere in the settings, Google has made the wise decision to combine the “display size” and “font size” screens, as they both affect how big everything is. You can now manage everything from one screen and there’s a big “reset” button at the bottom if you screw up.

Finally, we’ve got two new quick settings buttons: a QR code reader, which finally makes a third-party app obsolete, and a new “Security & Privacy” tile, which bundles the microphone, camera access, and location-kill switch into a single knob. Google displays these three little buttons in a giant full-screen popup, which is hopefully just evidence of some early alpha clumsiness.