Android 13 Digital Trends has taken a big step towards its release date

Google Announcement On Wednesday it released the third universal beta test for Android 13 exclusively on Google Pixel phones. While this latest beta doesn’t have a laundry list of new features to play with, it has reached the stability of the Android 13 platform for the first time – indicating that it is close to a huge step towards its public release later this year.

Platform stability means developer API and app compatibility and other details, including the overall quality of Android 13, are all being finalized. The latest update keeps track of the new Android OSK release calendar that Google shared in February when it released the first developer preview for Android 13.

Google plans to release Android 13 publicly around August and September of this year, with the beta program expected to run by the end of July (at least). Android 12 had four beta tests last year and did not reach platform stability until August 2021. This makes the Android 13 platform’s stabilization a tremendous achievement this June – and hints at a potentially more reliable OS update.

Android 12 was released last October and was hailed as one of the biggest Android updates in history. The update offers a plethora of new features, the most important of which is Material U, a customization feature that allows users to draw colors from their wallpapers and create themes for their apps and interfaces. Android 13 will make that feature even more, giving users more color options than what is currently available on Android 12.

Android 13 will come with new runtime permissions for notifications that require Android apps (such as games and shopping apps) to send notifications to users – reducing the amount of notification spam that has been confusing users for years. This will bring a new API to the clipboard, which will hide sensitive information from other apps, such as passwords and credit card information, so that hackers and other malicious parties cannot get their hands on them.