Why the iPhone has been so popular for almost the last few years
So as I was digging through Android 13 for a sort of similar demo, two things struck me. One, the iOS videos always get just absolutely nuts views literally every single time. And that's not just because the iPhone is already popular, but iOS updates just get saturation so quickly. There's a couple of sources estimating iOS 15was running on 90% of compatible iPhones well with in a year of it going out. So across the board, most people who had bought an iPhone in the last 4 years knew that they're going to get this software now an Android.
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| Android 13 |
And on the other hand, as of a week ago, the distribution chart looks a little something like this, which shows that about 13 and a half percent are on the latest version, Android 12. A much larger 27% are on a two gentle version, Android 11, and then another 22% are on Android 10. And then the breakdown continues from there. So this Android 13 stuff, I'm about to go over a few people, like Pixel owners in the beginning will be the ones to get this, but then it'll much more slowly trickle out to other phones as they get updated month by month. And that's sort of a general theme here.
Top five best Android 13 features.
But then number two, in both camps, these updates are more minor than ever. Obviously, they're both very mature in iOS. You could consider the new lock screen overhaul pretty major, but other than that, bunch of smaller stuff. And then with Android, we just had the big material you overhaul with Android Twelve. So with 13, they didn't really have to overhaul things. Again, it's a lot of smaller tweaks, and so that's what we're seeing. But I still do think a lot of the small stuff adds up to quality of life improvements. The best analogy, if you look at the Easter eggs, this is the Android Twelve Easter egg from last year, and this is the Android 13 Easter egg. It's almost the same thing, but you can tell it's a little different. But hey, here we are with the very latest and greatest from Google. I have it on my Pixel Six Pro, and so I've gone through all of the many updates and gone through the liberty of picking my top five best Android 13 features.
Solid Clipboard Improvements
So I'm going to start at number five, which is the clipboard. There are a bunch of really solid clipboard improvements for copying and pasting with Android. So first thing you're going to notice when you go to copy something, the new box pops up in the lower left corner. Whether it's text or an addressor URL or whatever you copy. When you copy text. The phone will now give you a preview with the option to tap on that box and then edit the text in the clipboard. So whatever you modifying here will be saved in your clipboard so that you can paste it later. And then if you copy an image, it will automatically take you right into Markup, so you can write on it or crop it or save it, whatever you want to do. And then your phone will recognize sensitive information if it's stored in your clipboard and automatically clear it after some time, I believe it's 1 hour.
So, for example, my package tracking app, every time I open it, right away, it just looks and sees what's in my clipboard if I just copied a tracking number from another app and it asks me if I want to paste it. But if I just copied like a Social Security number or a password or something else random like that, I don't want that in there. So anytime any app might look into your clipboard, it will be empty because of this new Android little clipboard update. And Google is also now working on an official built into Android universal copy and paste between phones and tablets. So it'll just work across. We already know a Pixel Tablet is coming. It's still a few months away. I guess it's sometime next year, but looking forward to that. They've done a lot of things in the tablet world in this Android 13 update, but this is one of them. The clipboard will now work across both.
Security & Privacy Improvements
So number four is security in general. Lots of nice security and privacy improvements. I think my favorite is that when you give apps access to a photo now, you can only access a few photos instead of your entire library. So it captures what iOS has been doing for a while. And also now notifications are all opt in. So apps have to ask you for permission to send notifications instead of any being allowed by default. There is also now an active app indicator below the notification slider. Maybe it's less security and being able to see what's going on and turn off anything you don't realize is draining your battery. But yeah, it's also just convenient.
Audio Enhancement Stuff
So the number three is some nice audio enhancement stuff. So Android 13 will now natively support native audio and Bluetooth Le for high-quality, low-energy, and low-latency audio. All good stuff. Side note, I'm currently testing the Pixel Bud Pro. As of today, when I'm using them, they do not support Spatial Audio. But there also is a blog post that says that they're going to be adding it later this year. So maybe a firmware update will eventually give me that. But so far they are pretty impressive. Stay tuned for that review because that's coming up soon.
APP-Specific Language Support
But number two, it's a really interesting one. Apparently this has been one of the most requested features in Android for some time now and now they are adding it, app-specific language support. So if you're bilingual, you speak more than one language, but you might only use that other language in a specific app. Maybe you have a family group chat and WhatsApp, or you have a special use case where you only use one app in a different language. Now, Android will support this exact switch without you having to work around it. So you go to settings, system languages and input and then clap. App developers must opt-in to do this. So every app doesn't show up right off the bat here, but I'm sure it should be a very quick checkbox that they flip and then they'll be supported in multiple languages. The entire system UI gets converted to the new language just for that one app. It's sweet. I'm not even someone who would actually use this feature, but I can understand how it would be useful. So that's great.
Aesthetics
So, last but not least, number one is aesthetics. So Content You was a major overhaul for Android Twelve. This was the major visual change they made. So now they're down to tweaking a lot of things that they initially changed for Android 12. And I think a lot of these changes are good. So in the customization section, the theme picker for your wallpapers is much more accurate.
Major Visual Change
- There are now 16 different multi-color options and 16 different single-color options, instead of the four of each that we had before. And there is a lot of granularity between them.
- Then there is the media player. It is good.
- The notification is large and it changes color based on the media you are listening to.
- if you tap the playback location, there's a big volume slider and you can quickly switch or more sources like headphones or speakers or your car. Or whatever you can add. But that new media player is cute.
- And then there's even some little visual stuff. As is the slightly new lock screen clock, there is the slightly new unlocking animation.
- If you'll notice that the Settings shortcut has moved from the middle to the bottom of Quick Settings to be much more accessible, actually like it here.
- And the bottom indicator bar is now slightly bigger and thicker. See Told you it was minor. There are a lot of little things, but again, it improves the quality of life.
- There are also many bug fixes and performance improvements and Android runtime improvements. Hopefully things are generally less petty and more streamlined.
- LINK:
- I'll link it below if you want to read them, but ideally, I mean, by now phones like the Pixel Six should run better than Android Twelve.
- I also want to point out that I think there is one thing that has gone wrong. I think Loki made some of the haptic patterns worse. I hope they think a little about them, but in general it is too much.
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