New features for Android 16 are emergingThe developer preview is still a work in progressThere are upgrades for audio, alerts, and privacy
Google pushed out the first developer preview of Android 16 yesterday (November 19), and while there weren’t many new features mentioned in the announcement, users who’ve installed the software are already coming across numerous upgrades.
It’s worth emphasizing that it’s early days for the software, and these features might disappear as suddenly as they appeared. They’re here for now though, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them as development on Android 16 continues.
First up, as spotted by 9to5Google, the Privacy Dashboard (available through the ‘Security and privacy’ menu in Settings) now lets you review a full seven days of history, rather than the 24 hours that’s currently available.
It means you’re able to look further back through time for apps that may have been misbehaving – accessing your phone’s camera, microphone, or location when they shouldn’t have been, for example.
Audio and notifications
Bluetooth Auracast support is arriving (Image credit: Future)
Next there’s the Audio Sharing feature previously spotted (but currently disabled) in Android 15. As Android Authority reports, this lets you share audio to multiple Bluetooth devices at once – two pairs of headphones, for example.
However, it relies on the Bluetooth Auracast standard, so you are going to need an Auracast-compatible phone for Audio Sharing to work – that’s any Pixel 8 or Pixel 9 handset, excluding the Google Pixel 8a.
Lastly in our mini round-up of new Android 16 features, there’s a new way to manage notification overload (via Android Authority again). As with Audio Sharing, this feature had shown up in Android 15 code that hadn’t been enabled – but now it’s live.
It’s called ‘Notification cooldown’, and it means multiple notifications from the same app, one after the other in a short space of time, will gradually decrease in volume. It’s a small tweak, but it should reduce the annoyance caused by multiple alerts.
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