Android 15 beta 1 is here with app archiving, edge-to-edge apps, and more!

Since February, we’ve been telling you about all the cool new features in the developer previews of Android 15. Today, though, we’ve reached a significant milestone: the first beta launch. This means developer previews are done, and Android 15 is ready for testing by the general public.

If you own a recent Pixel device, you can give Android 15 a shot today. We only recommend doing this if the Pixel device is not your main smartphone since Android 15 is still buggy and unreliable. Either way, if you have any of the following Pixels, Android 15 is ready for you:

Unfortunately, if you have a Pixel device not on that list, Android 15 will not work for you. If you have a supported device and you’re ready to try it out, you can read our instructions on how to install Android 15.

What’s new in Android 15 beta 1

As we’ve mentioned a few times over the past few months, Android 15 is not a wild revamp of the system. It will look and feel a lot like Android 14. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t new and exciting stuff included. Here are some highlights included with this first beta.

OS-level app archiving

We actually leaked info about app archiving in Android 15 back in March. This new tool allows you to archive an app right from within Android. Just head to the app’s listing in Android Settings and hit the Archive button you find there. This will remove most of the data associated with that app but keep your personal data intact. When you want that app on your system again, just restore it from the same Settings page. This redownloads all the missing app data and restores the app to the same state it was in before you archived it.

Essentially, this is a tool that adds a nice middle ground between keeping an app installed or completely uninstalling it. When you uninstall an app and then reinstall it, you lose a lot of data, including your saved login. But that’s not a problem with archiving, so this is a neat new tool.

If this tool sounds familiar, it’s because this already can happen automatically through the Play Store. However, the main differences here are that this is manual and it is built into Android itself.

Edge-to-edge apps

Edge-to-edge app support is another thing we shared before Google officially rolled it out. Today, developers creating apps targeting Android 14 or earlier can choose to have their apps take up the entire display. If they do, it looks like the image you see above on the right. If they don’t, it looks like the image on the left.

Apps targeting Android 15, though, will automatically fill up the entire screen, regardless of whether or not the dev chooses for it to happen. It will take time, but eventually, all the major apps will look like the image on the right, giving Android a uniform look that best takes advantage of your entire display.

Braille support

TalkBack — Android’s suite of accessibility tools — now supports a wide variety of Braille displays. This is a terrific change that will help people with vision impairments better use their devices.

Miscellaneous changes

• Inter-character justification: This is a change that will allow for the better display of languages that use letter spacing for segmentation, such as Chinese, Japanese, etc.
• App-managed profiling: The new ProfilingManager class will allow devs to collect certain types of information from users in a simpler and more performance-friendly way.
• Key management for E2EE: This one is a bit technical, but the outcome is that users will be able to have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for contact keys. This will allow them to manage and verify other people’s contact information securely.
• Secured background activity launches: Android 10 first introduced restrictions on background activity launches. This prevents malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground, which could be used as an attack on the user. Android 15 further strengthens this feature.

There will be more to see!

Above are the new items in Android 15 beta 1 that Google has told us about. However, Google almost always does not disclose other changes. Stay tuned for the next 24 hours, as we will undoubtedly find much more in the first beta.