The first beta of Android 16 is now available for recent Pixel devices, and it’s the first publicly available version of Android 16 that can be installed via an over-the-air update. As usual, Google has announced the release with a blog post aimed at developers that highlights features that app makers should be aware of, but which also provides some hints of what users can expect.

But bloggers at sites like Android Police and 9to5Google have started searching through the new version of Android to find more user-facing changes. Here are some of the things that will be coming to Android phones and tablets when the next version of Android is released in the second quarter of 2025 (most likely in May or June).

Adaptive apps for large screens

One significant change should help folks with Android tablets or foldable phones with big screens. Google is starting to phase out the ability for app developers to restrict screen sizes or orientations for their apps. In other words if an app is made for smartphones and the developer doesn’t bother to modify it to play well with bigger screens, up until now they could effectively tell Android to show black bars on the sides of the app. That’s going away, which means that more apps will take up the full screen (whether they look good in full-screen mode or not).

Since this is a phased changed, Google is going to let developer opt out this year. But a version of Android set to launch in 2026 will not allow developers to opt out. So apps targeting API level 37 (the version coming in 2026) will have to be adaptive apps that can expand to fill larger screens.

Live Updates (notifications)

Google is adding support for this new notifications feature to “help users monitor and quickly access important ongoing activities” by adding support for custom icons for the start, end, and current progress of an activity, as well as intermediate segments and points.

This allows notifications to display things like the status of food, grocery, or package delivery, a rideshare pickup, or navigation, among other things. Adding this info to the notification status allows you to see key information on your Lock Screen without unlocking your device and pulling down the notification drawer.

Apple’s iPhones have a similar features called Live Activities.

Of course, this feature isn’t automatically applied. App developers will have to add support for Live Updates to their apps, so you may start to see this feature on some apps starting later this year, but I wouldn’t expect all apps to support it right away.

Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec

Android 16 adds support for recording, playing, and editing videos in the AVP codec, which is made for professional video recording and post production.

It’s a “perceptually lossless” codec that’s “close to raw video quality” while still being a compressed format to save space, while allowing you to decode and re-encode video multiple times “without severe visual quality degradation.”

Android 16 will support the APV 422-10 profile with support for 10-bit encoding, YUV 422 color sampling, and bitrates up to 2 Gbps.

Other updates

The first Android 16 beta also brings a number of bug fixes as well as developer-focused features like one that makes it easier for apps to know when to switch a camera to night mode, one that adds “low-level support for rendering and measuring text vertically” for languages like Japanese, and wider support for predictive back system animations.

You can find more details at the Android Developers Blog.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when Android 16 arrives in Q2, 2025, it will be the first of two significant updates coming this year. Google is also planning a “minor SDK release” for the fourth quarter of 2025. That version is expected to have additional feature updates, improvements, and bug fixes. But it shouldn’t have any major impact on apps that target Android 16.