Google released the second Developer Preview of Android 12 earlier today, and it includes several new features that should excite users. First of all, there are new picture-and-picture gestures as we first reported last month. Developers can now easily apply a blur effect to the background, plus there are improvements to notification visibility for better privacy. But outside of the officially announced changes, there are loads of new features that are present or hidden away in Android 12 Developer Preview 2. Here’s a summary of all the hidden features that we found.
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- Pixel Launcher has a new Search widget
- Taskbar for large screen devices
- Face-based autorotation
- Game Dashboard
- Conversation/People Space Widget Picker
- Revamped PIN view
- Enhanced Monet Theming System
- New Toast Message UI
- New Lockscreen Open/Close Animation
- New Overscroll and Ripple Animations
- Privacy indicators for camera and microphone
- Other Changes
Pixel Launcher has a new Search widget
Currently, the search widget seen at the bottom of the home screen or at the top of the app list in the Pixel Launcher is powered by the Google App. The Google App is quite bloated, as it contains services for Google Search, Google Assistant, Google Lens, Google Podcasts, and more. The current search widget can thus be quite slow to open, but thankfully Google has a solution to this problem. The company is working on a new search widget provider that doesn’t rely on the Google App. We actually caught a brief glimpse of this feature back in Android 12 DP1, but DP2 brings a couple of improvements to the feature.
