Android 15 makes physical keyboards easier to use

Although the Android operating system runs on more than just Android phones, the operating system is optimized for traditional touchscreen phablets. However, over the past few years, Google has significantly accelerated its efforts to enrich the Android experience on other devices such as smartwatches, TVs, cars, and tablets. One area that has been significantly improved in recent versions is physical keyboard support, which benefits not only tablets but also phones running in a desktop-like environment.

In Android 14, Google has made several changes to improve physical keyboard support. These changes include modifier key remapping, touchpad gesture support, keyboard backlight support, and expanded shortcut key availability. With the upcoming release of Android 15, Google will add some new settings to make the physical keyboard easier to use. For example, when you connect a keyboard to your device and open the physical keyboard settings in the latest Android 15 Developer Preview 2 build, you’ll find that there’s now an Accessibility section with three features disabled by default. These include:

• sticky keys: Enable Sticky Keys for physical keyboard accessibility
• slow key: Enable slow keys for physical keyboard accessibility
• Bounce key: Enable bouncing keys for physical keyboard accessibility

While the description doesn’t reveal much about what each feature actually does, the names speak volumes. All three are common accessibility features in desktop operating systems such as Windows. These features are most useful for people with motor disabilities, but anyone who has difficulty typing on a physical keyboard can also enable them.

The Sticky Keys feature makes it easier to enter keyboard shortcuts in quick succession. For example, when you press a modifier key such as CTRL or ALT with Sticky Keys enabled, the modifier key remains pressed so that you don’t have to hold it down when pressing other keys. If you use Windows, you may have accidentally enabled this feature before because by default, the operating system enables it when you press the Shift key five times in a row. Android 15 DP2 does not currently toggle Sticky Keys if you press the Shift key quickly, although this may change in a future release.

Next is Key Slow, a feature that adjusts how long the user must hold down a key before the system accepts it. Tapping the Windows key on a physical keyboard will take the user back to the Android home screen, but with slow keystrokes enabled, the Windows key must be held down for half a second. Android 15 DP2 does not currently support adjusting the hold duration, but a brief analysis of the latest version of the code shows that the maximum threshold can be set to 5 seconds. Therefore, a future Android 15 preview may add a setting to adjust the threshold. Given that the descriptions of Sticky Keys, Slow Keys, and Bounce Keys are clearly placeholders, it’s likely that Google is still working on these features.

Finally, there’s the bounce key setting, which lets the Android operating system ignore rapid, repeated presses of the same key. For example, enabling bouncing keys on Windows makes it easier to avoid accidentally enabling sticky keys.

In addition to these three new accessibility features, Android 15 improves physical keyboard support in another way. The Settings app now shows a preview of the keyboard layout you selected in Physical Keyboard Setup. This can be helpful when you’re used to typing in one specific layout but are forced to use a keyboard with a different physical layout. The preview helps you visualize where you need to click to press the keys you’re used to pressing on your preferred layout.

With all the new physical keyboard features Google has introduced in recent releases, the Android operating system is taking another step towards becoming a better desktop computing platform. Google is rumored to be developing physical keyboard accessories for its Pixel tablets and a desktop mode for the Pixel 8, so it’s important for Google to add the basic keyboard functionality that users are used to before trying to market Android as a similar productivity environment. .