Android 12 review

Fluidity

Looks aren't everything - everyone knows that Google included. So looks aren't the only thing changing in Android 12. The company has done some under-the-hood work to reduce CPU time needed for the core system services by up to 22% and reduced the use of big cores by the system server by 15%.

Additionally, it's redone the animations and made elements in motion on the screen feel smoother. The lock screen clock changes dynamically based on whether you have any notifications or not, and interactions with the OS have been simplified. All of this is to say - Android 12 feels smoother and more fluid than any version before it. And we don't mean that it does so on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro - in fact, we've used a Pixel 4 XL from 2019 for this review to see just how the older hardware would cope with the new software. And the answer is, in a word, flawlessly. The phone really does feel smoother and ever so slightly faster in operation than it did before.

Privacy dashboard

Android 12 wants to convince you that it's big on privacy, and so it features a brand new Privacy dashboard in Settings. The aim here is for you to have more input into which apps are accessing your data and more controls so you can make informed choices about how much of your data apps are allowed to get.

New Privacy menu with Privacy dashboard

The Privacy dashboard is a single unified view into your permissions settings and what data is being accessed, how often, and by which apps. You can easily revoke any permissions from here if you want to. The highlighted permissions are those for apps to access your location, camera, and mic, but there's a list of all permissions hidden behind a button at the bottom.

Camera and mic usage indicators

Speaking of the camera and mic usage, you also get little visual indicators on the right side of your status bar when an app is using these. So you know when they're actively being accessed too, not just after the fact through the Privacy Dashboard.

Some Quick Settings toggles let you quickly disable access to the camera and microphone for all apps from that point forward.

Approximate location

As for location, you can choose to share only your approximate location with some apps, those that you deem unworthy of getting access to your exact location (a weather app, for example). This choice is an additional option on the location permission pop-up that you see when an app requests location access.

Private compute core

Android 12 features what Google calls a Private Compute Core (PCC), which has the aim of keeping your information private from several AI-powered features like Live Caption, Now Playing, and Smart Reply.

The PCC is a secure partition within the OS, similar to those used to store passwords and biometric data. The aforementioned machine learning features will only live on that partition, not making contact with the internet and not even interacting with other parts of the OS, to ensure that sensitive data about you never leaves your device. The protections in the PCC are open source and thus fully inspectable by third parties that may wish to do so. The PCC section in Privacy settings also lets you turn off keyboard suggestions and the other features of on-device machine learning.

Furthering the improved privacy front, whenever an app accesses your clipboard, you'll see a pop-up toast message telling you that's what's happened. Oh, and Bluetooth scanning can now happen without requiring Location permission.

Other under the hood improvements

As always, with the new release, Google has worked to improve Android under the hood as well, to make app developers' lives easier. For example, Android 12 has a splash screen API, enabling a new launch animation for all apps, including an into-app motion at launch, a splash screen with the app's icon, and a transition to the app itself. This standardizes the design and functionality of splash screens across the OS, and developers are free to use the new API to make their splash screens be in line with Google's.

Starting with Android 12, Google has introduced a new standard called "performance class". Each such class defines a set of device capabilities that goes beyond Android's baseline requirements. Each version of Android has its own corresponding performance class, and each Android device has to declare the class that it supports.

A device can upgrade to a newer Android version without updating its performance class, even if it doesn't meet the new version's performance class requirement. Google wants this performance class to be an easy way to group devices together without relying on a particular Android version. We assume that this could be used by app developers to enable/disable specific features based on a device's performance class.