On February the 13th of 2025, Google finally dropped the second beta of Android 16, bringing camera enhancements, a new shortcut for Google Wallet, and crucial bug fixes. While developers get the most out of this update, here is what users need to know.
What’s new for users ?
Since this beta is not focused on introducing significant user-facing features, you may not notice many changes. Codenamed Baklava, this version primarily enhances the API, providing developers with new tools to improve Android applications.
However, if you're not a developer, here are the main changes you might notice:
New camera features
Google has made several improvements to the camera app. Since the first beta of Android 16, the company has promised to enhance picture quality with UltraHDR images. In Android 16 Beta 2, they have confirmed this by adding support for UltraHDR in HEIC images.
For developers, this means these images will have an
ImageFormatset toHEIC_ULTRAHDR.
According to the Android development team:
"We're working on AVIF support for UltraHDR as well, so stay tuned.".
This means richer colors and better contrast, while keeping an efficient compression, in order not to get too heavy pictures.
Google Wallet just got easier to access
For several Android versions, users have been able to open the camera by double pressing the power button. However, there has never been any option to assign this shortcut to another app - until now.
With Android 16 Beta 2, Google has introduced an option to open Google Wallet using the same double-press shortcut. Unlike the camera shortcut, opening the Wallet app does not trigger haptic feedback, making the feature feel slightly unfinished. Nonetheless, it's great to see Google adding more customization options to Android.
Bug fixes
Betas are also the perfect moment to get feedback from users, in order to know what bugs this new version brought. And indeed, the Android 16 beta 1 added a few bugs here and there, and some of them were fixed in the beta 2:
- Some interactions in Webviews used to make the System UI crash. This issue is now resolved (issue #392011635).
- Some devices used to freeze and reboot during phone calls: this has been fixed as well (issue #392364716).
- Since Android 16, the Google Home app had random crashes that have been fixed too.
Conclusion
Although the Android 16 beta 2 did bring more features to developers than it did to users, we can still notice a few changes here and there, like camera enhancements, bringing UltraHDR support for HEIC images, but also a new shortcut to open Google Wallet, along with a few bug fixes.
Android 16 is supposed to reach its final stage shortly after May 2025 (you can see the timeline here. If you want to try it before this date, you can try Android 16 here. For those who already tried it, what do you think about Android 16 so far ? Is this update exciting for you ? Would you trade your camera shortcut for Google Wallet access ? Let us know in the comments !
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