Android 15 beta 1 now available for Pixel phones

Since February, we’ve been telling you about all the cool new features in the Android 15 Developer Preview. However, today we reached an important milestone: the first beta release. This means that the developer preview is complete and Android 15 is ready for public testing.

If you have the latest Pixel device, you can give Android 15 a try today. We only recommend doing this if your Pixel device isn’t your primary smartphone, as Android 15 is still buggy and unreliable. Either way, if you have any of the following Pixels, Android 15 is ready for you:

Unfortunately, if your Pixel device isn’t on that list, Android 15 isn’t for you. If you have a supported device and are ready to give it a try, you can read our instructions on how to install Android 15.

What’s new in Android 15 Beta 1

As we’ve mentioned many times over the past few months, Android 15 isn’t a crazy overhaul of the system. It looks and feels a lot like Android 14. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something new and exciting in it. Here are some of the highlights included in the first beta.

In fact, we leaked information about app archiving in Android 15 back in March. This new tool allows you to archive apps directly from within Android. Just go to the app list in Android Settings and tap the Archive button found there. This will delete most of the data associated with the app but will keep your personal data intact. When you want the app to appear on your system again, just restore it from the same Settings page. This will re-download all lost application data and restore the application to the same state it was in before it was archived.

Essentially, this is a tool that adds a nice middle ground between keeping an app installed or uninstalling it completely. When you uninstall an app and then reinstall it, you lose a lot of data, including your saved login information. But that’s not a problem for archiving, so this is a neat new tool.

If this tool sounds familiar, that’s because this can already happen automatically through the Play Store. However, the main difference here is that this is manual and it’s built into Android itself.

Edge-to-edge app support is another thing we shared ahead of Google’s official launch. Now, developers creating apps for Android 14 or earlier can choose to have their apps take up the entire display. If you do this, it will look like the image you see at the top right. If not, it will look like the image on the left.

However, apps targeting Android 15 will automatically fill the entire screen regardless of whether developers choose to do so. It’ll take time, but eventually, all major apps will give Android a unified look like the one pictured on the right that best utilizes the entire display.

Braille support

TalkBack — Android’s suite of accessibility tools — now supports a variety of braille displays. This is an amazing change that will help people with visual impairments use their devices better.

Miscellaneous changes

• Inter-character plausibility: This change will allow for better display of languages ​​that use letter spacing for segmentation, such as Chinese, Japanese, etc.
• Analysis of application management: new ProfilingManager Classes will allow developers to collect certain types of information from users in a simpler, more performance-friendly way.
• E2EE key management: It’s a bit technical, but the upshot is that users will be able to encrypt contact keys end-to-end (E2EE). This will allow them to securely manage and verify other people’s contact information.
• Security background activity starts: Android 10 first introduced restrictions on the launch of background activities. This prevents malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground, which could be used to attack the user. Android 15 further enhances this feature.

There will be more to see!

The above are the new items in Android 15 beta 1 that Google revealed to us. However, Google almost always doesn’t reveal other changes. Stay tuned over the next 24 hours as we will undoubtedly discover more in this first beta.