Android Q Reaches Public Beta With Improved Privacy, Opus/AV1 Support, ANGLE On Vulkan

Google today rolled out their first public beta/development release of the upcoming Android Q that will be formally released in the second half of 2019.

Android Q is introducing new privacy protections, new foldable screen support given the recent wave of foldable devices, the ability to share shortcuts, improved peer-to-peer/internet connectivity, new WiFi performance and low latency modes, support for the AV1 video codec, support for audio encoding using Opus, a native MIDI API, and other enhancements.

Exciting us on the technical front is support for ANGLE on Vulkan for devices supporting this high-performance graphics API. Google's ANGLE implementation allows for running OpenGL ES 2.0 atop Vulkan hard drivers while they are still working on OpenGL ES 3.0 mapping on top of Vulkan too. This should yield better performance for newer devices. Google is also aiming to make Vulkan 1.1 support a requirement for all 64-bit devices planning to run Android Q.

More details on the very exciting Android Q Beta changes via the Android developers' blog.