After releasing the first beta for Android 11 last month followed by an incremental update, Google has today released the second beta of its operating system. The release is primarily aimed at achieving Platform Stability.
Platform Stability milestone refers to the point when the software giant finalizes the APIs and SDKs ahead of the final stable release. The final release is expected sometime in Q3, probably on September 8.
What this means for app developers is that they can get started with making their apps ready for Android 11. According to Google’s Developers blog, the following are the top behavior changes for apps, starting with Android 11:
- One-time permission – Users can now grant single-use permission to access location, device microphone, and camera.
- External storage access – Apps can no longer access other apps’ files in external storage.
- Scudo hardened allocator – Now the heap memory allocator for native code in apps.
- File descriptor sanitizer – Now enabled by default to detect file descriptor handling issues for native code in apps.
The company encourages developers to test compatibility for Scoped storage, Background location, Package visibility, Compressed resource files, APK Signature Scheme v2, and Heap pointer tagging, if the target SDK version is above 30.
- Google Pixel 2: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Pixel 2 XL: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Google Pixel 3: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Pixel 3 XL: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Google Pixel 3a: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Pixel 3a XL: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Google Pixel 4: Factory Image | OTA Image
- Pixel 4 XL: Factory Image | OTA Image
As always, the update is available to download for Pixel devices. If you have a compatible device, you may check out the instructions right here to install Android 11 Beta 2 on your smartphone.
