Android 12 beta 5 finally brings the promised full device search feature — Our coverage of Android 12 beta 5 and the useful on-device search feature that is now accessible through the Pixel app drawer.

Android 12 features: Everything confirmed so far — Our up-to-date list of all the new features confirmed for Android 12.

Android 12 Beta 5 update, official release is next! — If September seemed a little slow, next month is sure to be a lot bigger! Just weeks before the official release of Android 12, Google snuck out one more beta. This version doesn’t focus on exciting new features but instead serves as a “release candidate” for the final build.

Android Dev Summit returns on October 27-28, 2021 — As the title of this post has likely already given away, Google has now set a date for its next Dev Summit. This year, the theme is “Excellent apps, across devices.” In early posts from Google, app “excellence” has been defined as providing consistent, effortless, and “seamless” user experiences.

Improved Google Play Console user management: access requests, permission groups, and more — This is news for bigger dev teams: the Google Play Console now supports better user and permission management tools. Now teams can delegate more work, without giving away the keys to their entire kingdom!

Making permissions auto-reset available to billions more devices — This relatively small change should nevertheless be on the radar for devs. If your app isn’t used for few months, permissions will be reset. This change previously affected users on Android 11 but will now roll out to devices running Android 6.0 and up. There are some exceptions and necessary code changes, so it’s worth reading the full post.

Wear OS Jetpack libraries now in stable — The first five Jetpack Wear OS libraries are now in stable. These are: wear, wear-input, wear-ongoing, wear-phone-interactions, and wear-remote-interaction. These handle UI elements, hardware buttons, notifications, phone compatibility, and Android intents, respectively.

Bringing richer navigation, charging, parking apps to more Android Auto users — At the start of September, Google released a beta version of the Android for Cars App Library 1.1. This also marks the completion of the transition to Jetpack.