The Android development team has just released the first beta for Android 15, which allows developers and early adopters to start using it on their supported Pixel devices. 

As of this beta, apps can now be displayed edge-to-edge by default, meaning that content will be visible behind system bars like the notification bar at the top or the navigation bar at the bottom. Previously, to unlock this feature developers would have to call a specific function. To help developers make their apps work well edge-to-edge, there are many Material 3 composables that will now handle insets for them.

This release also unlocks the ability to register a fingerprint for tap to pay experiences. This will notify users of polling loop activity by NFC apps. The observe mode changes that were first introduced in the second developer preview have also been added to the NFC experience.

Another new feature is the ability to justify text based on letter spacing, which will be useful in languages that use white space for segmentation, like Chinese and Japanese. 

Android 15 also introduces OS level support for app archiving and unarchiving, which was a feature introduced last year to save space by removing infrequently used apps. Archived apps still display in the launcher with an icon that shows it needs to be redownloaded. 

Other new features in this Android 15 beta include:

  • A ProfilingManager class that allows collection of information such as heap dumps, heap profiles, and stack sampling
  • Support for Braille in the TalkBack screen reader
  • Key management for end-to-end encryption
  • More features to prevent malicious background apps from moving other apps to the foreground and elevating their privileges 

“Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity, give users a premium app experience, protect user privacy and security, and make your app accessible to as many people as possible — all in a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of devices, silicon partners, and carriers,” Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for Android, wrote in a blog post.