Android 12 Beta 3 has a crazy new way to handle auto-rotate

Google is releasing the latest beta version of Android 12 on schedule. Beta 3 for Android 12 continues to add features including scrolling screenshots, faster universal app search on the device, improved auto-rotate, and more. Google says this version of Android 12 has the “Android 12 APIs and Official SDK”, which means there shouldn’t be any major feature changes in future beta releases. That should mean Android 12 is still on track for a fall release.

The coolest new feature in Android 12 Beta 3 is “better and faster auto-rotate”. Google now uses the front camera and face detection to determine which orientation you’re trying to hold the phone in (instead of just relying on the accelerometer).

“This is especially useful for people who use their devices while lying on a sofa or in bed,” writes Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android. This means that you could be lying on your side in bed with the phone in a horizontal position, but since the camera can see that your face is horizontal as well, it will stay in portrait mode.

Burke is quick to point out that this face detection happens locally in Android 12’s “Private Compute Core”, so images are never stored or sent off the device. When I first introduced Android 12, I had to spend some time explaining what Android Private Compute Core (APCC) is: a special and secure area of ​​the operating system to run algorithms that can contain sensitive data.

The importance of the APCC in the original announcement was a clear hint that Google intended to create more Android features that could potentially raise privacy concerns – and here we are, seeing that hint come true. As I wrote then, “an easier way to think about it is if there is an AI function that you might think is scary, Google runs it inside the APCC so that its powers are limits”.

Burke says Google has also “optimized animation and redrawing and added an ML-driven gesture detection algorithm.” He claims this will reduce auto-spin latency by 25%. Auto-rotate on Android has always been pretty janky – and extremely inconsistent between different manufacturers – so hopefully those claims will be true.

The magic of auto-rotate is cool, but the feature that will probably get the most applause from Android users is a system-level consistent way to create scrolling screenshots, that is, – say screenshots that allow you to capture more than one screen in a single image like on a web page.

Image: Google

Android 12 has new toggles that allow you to mute the camera or microphone at the system level. With Beta 3, the business administrator in charge of your work (or government) phone will now be able to control these failovers, preventing you from accessing them if this is appropriate for your device.

Google is also pushing developers to use a new search engine on the AppSearch device both in their apps and across the phone. Developers will be able to choose which parts of their apps will be indexed for universal search on the device or in other apps.

Google also recently announced that Android 12 will allow users to start playing games before they’ve finished downloading. And as with Beta 2, there may be smaller, unannounced tweaks yet to be discovered. Beta 3 is expected to roll out to Pixel phones today, alongside a small handful of devices from Oppo, Realme, Sharp, OnePlus, and others (but not Samsung, of course).

As for the final version of Android 12, it will arrive on Pixel phones first, but could hit some of those manufacturers early on as well. Google has improved its release rate for Android updates, but it will still never match the speed you see on iOS.