The Android update treadmill continues with the release of Android 13. It’s one of the smallest Android releases in recent memory, with barely any user-facing features to point to. Keep in mind, though, that this update follows the monster Android 12 release from last year. This is also the second Android OS release this year, the previous one being the tablet-focused Android 12L update that was rushed out the door in March.
We would have a bit more meat to work with if Android 12L was part of this release, but as it is, we’re left with a grab bag of features for Android 13. It includes many foundational features for Android tablets and smart displays, but there’s not much here for phones.
Ars Technica’s usual deep dive into every new Android release, and despite Android 13 being a relatively minor release, there’s still more than enough to cover.
There is one feature (pretty much only one) that makes this release totally worth it for me: the ability to set a language other than the system setting for specific apps. No more Maps navigation with strangely pronounced street names!
Who wants features? It is just an OS after all and nothing great. The changes are on the whole nice fixes of 12’s bad points.
Of copurse not everyone get’s updates but hey choose your phone carefully if you do but hey most don’t.
@Moochman language yeah. I hate the fwact my work phone and PC (more the PC) default to german. Yes I understand the terms, No I don’t want them. Peril’s of working from a multinational that will ship german windows (localisation settings are so bad on there there is so much you cannot correct) to you and also phones from the nation with a plug adaptor and hey android may be a slight bit better there but some things still don’t change. (let’s not get into web geo-location crap because my endpoint may be in another country, which has changed a couple of times, come on make it easy to chage settings for people who do not understand the language, so many assumptions).
Location based localization is the worst. if i visit google. com for example in serbia i get redirected to the google.rs site in cyrillic (which i can not read) even though my laptop is set to my native language.
many sites also use your ip location to secide language and as a traveling man it is annoying (and sometimes impossible) to figure out how to read terms of services, change settings to a language i can read.. i wish sites repected the browser language choise.
NaGERST,
+1
The default needs to be the computer’s locale passed in with the request, that’s the best clue as to which language the user wants by default. A cookie can be used if the owner wants to override it, but using the IP address is the wrong way to select language! Just because my IP address changes doesn’t mean I want the language to change, what a disservice!
Android more or less got done. Can do everything general public could ever desire. Now (flagship) mobile phones are getting ridiculously big and expensive. And we are going backwards with Android development. New theme, bigger buttons, more resources, more Google …. Not driven by some special desires anymore. I will not be surprised if people will call them dumb phones in a couple of years. And the same goes for iPhone. It’s like PC in 2022. You end up buying one but hard to get excited. In contrary to ten or twenty or thirty … years back. When this was really a thing.
It’s hilarious when people think their state of affairs reflects the totality of reality.
You’re just getting old and feel different about things that once excited you.
There are generations born well after you, who are as (or even more) excited about current products as you were at that age back in the day.
javiercero1,
You might say youth are more easily excitable because of their age, but only to a point. I don’t think that’s the whole picture. It’s natural for people to find a mature market less interesting simply because it’s been iterated so many times already and things are no longer new. One doesn’t have to be old to recognize that things stop being groundbreaking.
Nah. You guys are just getting old. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an inevitable part of life.
But whenever there is news about a new product/technology… there are the inevitable orthogonal comments dismissing it by people, who are trying to bring the clock back to a time where they felt they were with “it.” As that must have obviously been the “proper” incarnation for said “it.” After all, their subjective experience predicates the whole of existence.
This applies to tech, music, sports, food, politics, or any other component of the whole human experience thingie.
Plenty of people, today, are plenty excited for products they may not be able to afford. Just as you guys were excited for products you were not able to afford back in your day.
javiercero1,
The same can be said of operating systems, technology, computers, smart phones, and everything else. Even though technology has become much more advanced today, it simply doesn’t have the same novelty when the market was fresh. “Nothing wrong with that, it’s an inevitable part of product lifecycle”.
Logically in a mathematical set which includes every invention, the distance between something that is new/modified and something that already exists decreases with every generation by virtue of more stuff existing over time. Innovations become more incremental over time.
Old people can still get excited. If there is anything to get excited about. Current generations of mobile phones and operating systems for it are just not exciting anymore. As it got done. You can only get away with it for so long. Before people will notice. There isn’t anything all that novel in “next version”.
I don’t feel age has much to do with it. It’s like saying people in general got really excited when the last couple of Windows versions got released. Or if you want to focus on young people. Young people waited for years to switch to something else from Facebook. On top of that young people can’t afford flagship phones today. As they are made for older people with money. Excitement has nothing to do with when you are young or old. If something is new and groundbreaking or has evolved much. That is in general exciting. Mobile phones in general are way past that. On top of that they are getting ridiculous. Just try to fit one in your pocket. Around the same size as first mainframes. It’s just meh. Total lack of new ideas involved.
Ok, ok, I Agree with you on the phone situation, but don’t rag on windows 10 like that. It was so nice and wonderful to see after windows 8. It made windows alot less painful to use.
All time I’d say the most exciting windows releases
Win 3.11
Win NT 4
Win 98 SE
Win XP
Win 10
Win 7
This is my list and my spite against windows 95 won’t allow it to be on my list despite everyone elses love of it.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
That’s true, but I think there would have been a lot less fanfare about win10 being better if windows 8.x hadn’t preceded it, haha. Microsoft knew they had an unpopular product with windows 8 & metro even during the beta, but I think that releasing unpopular operating systems is part of a marketing strategy to subconsciously get people into the cyclic mindset: “I’ll skip the bad ones, and upgrade on the good ones”.
In regards to Windows i would say that with Windows 7 it was done. Then it went backwards. With everything that followed. If we go back to Android. I guess it does make sense. As now old people with Facbook use flagship Android phones. Buttons hence must be made bigger. For old people to see them without glasses. One does have to wonder on how we managed. With half the screen size and half the button size in the past.
Years back you took the latest mobile phone from your pocket an all where like wow. Then the same thing happened with so called smart phones. Today nobody cares anymore. Seen that done that. Manufactures try to dress that with some gimmicks. Like flip phones or tablet size phones. But this are all desperate attempts. As nobody really asked for that.
Oh man, I figured it out I think. Android 13… Pixel Tablet .. Fuchsia … Google Nest Hub 3. It will be one device, with two operating systems supported by the virtualization framework in Android 13. The display attached to the base in standard google nest hub 3 will be running Fushia, but you separate it and it… switches the operating system that controls the tablet to Android 13 for the full experience.