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If you’re reading this on an Android device with a bigger screen, fixed or folding, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system will force your apps to be better tenants of that screen real estate.
That’s the major news in Google’s aborted announcement Wednesday of the first beta release of Android 17, due sometime in the second quarter of this year: App developers won’t be able to opt out of screen orientation and resizing features when running on devices with bigger screens.
We say “aborted” because Google provided us and other tech news sites an advance copy of the post that was supposed to be published at 10 a.m. Pacific–then, a little over an hour after that embargo expired, notified us that it was pushing back that release.
“Beta 1 will actually be coming soon, not today,” a hapless publicist emailed.
“Users expect their apps to work everywhere—whether multitasking on a tablet, unfolding a device, or using a desktop windowing environment—and they expect the UI to fill the space and respect their device posture,” that advance copy of Google’s blog post read.
The rest of it didn’t offer much of a hint about what Android 17 will look like, mostly covering features and options that aren’t exposed to users. Among them:
- improvements to inter-process messaging and memory management;
- media refinements such as support for the Versatile Video Coding format on devices with sufficient processing power to handle that codec;
- security upgrades that include making it harder for apps to send data in the clear;
- easier handling of health and fitness devices and trackers.
Shockingly enough, the abbreviation “AI” appeared nowhere in the text of this post.
The embargoed copy of Google’s post outlined a relatively quick development schedule for Android 17, with the “platform stability” milestone estimated for sometime in March. It should be able to hit that mark, having done so with last year’s Android 16 on only a slightly longer schedule–the company posted the first beta Jan. 23, reached platform stability March 13, and shipped the update June 10.
Non-Google vendors of Android phones will probably need additional months to ship Android 17 after Google makes it available to its own Pixel series, which run a stock configuration of Android.
Samsung, for example, did not bring its version of Android 16, including an updated version of its One UI software, for its newest non-foldable phones until September, and Motorola took even longer.
As with Android 16, Google plans to ship a secondary update to it sometime in Q4 of this year. That may make a bigger difference to your everyday experience of Android; the part of Android 16 that I notice most often on my own Pixel 9 Pro, AI-condensed app notifications, didn’t ship until that secondary release in December.
Editors’ note: We revised the post after Google hit the “undo” button on this announcement.