Google has released the first beta of Android 16. Although the final version won’t be available until the second quarter of 2025, the internet giant says that “it’s time to open up the experience to both developers and early adopters . ”

Android 16 will be the next version of the operating system that not only rules the world in terms of mobility, but also in terms of the total number of devices installed worldwide, far surpassing Windows in market share . In addition, hundreds of manufacturers depend on Google’s previous work with Android, licensing the operating system or using the new versions to update the billions of active devices.

Google has listed the main new features it is working on for Android 16. Although the company has so far focused on developers and in any case we will detail them in future articles, we can advance that there will be news in the following main points :

• Adaptive Android apps, so they work on any type of screen or orientation.
• Live Updates, a new set of notifications that will help you monitor and quickly access important activities.
• Cameras and multimedia, with improvements to support high-quality media playback, creation, and editing.
• Vertical text. Android 16 will add low-level support for rendering and sizing text vertically.
• Accessibility. New accessibility APIs to help developers make their apps accessible to all users.
• Behavior. Balance between system performance and battery life.
• Gemini Extensions, with new APIs to increase the capacity of the AI ​​ecosystem.
• App compatibility. Google has announced that the Android 16 preview program will be extended until the final public release scheduled ( as we had anticipated ) for the second quarter of 2025. A key date for developers to get their applications ready.

How to test the Android 16 beta

The easiest way to try out the new version is to use it on a compatible smartphone. If you’re interested, you can enroll your device in the Android Beta Program and thus gain access to preliminary versions of the system. The point is that so far, Pixel devices are supported, from the 6 series to the 9 series, including Pixel phones and also tablets. Google has a complete page as a tutorial to try out the new version now.

Android Studio and AVD Manager

Native installation on a smartphone (or tablet) is obviously its natural scenario, but Google has long offered other possibilities for use on personal computers, especially thinking of developers who work in its ecosystem and, in general, those enthusiastic users who like to try everything from the first moment.

For this purpose, we have available  Android Studio , the tool for creating Android applications that offers an integrated development environment (IDE) that helps programmers to code in a simple way. As for the AVD Manager ( Android Virtual Device Manager ), it is a utility included in the general package that allows developers to create a virtual Android smartphone or  an Android emulator to test mobile applications.

Installation on a PC

If you follow us regularly, you should know the process because we have been using it with previous versions . If you are going to use Android Studio for development tasks, remember that you must first install the Java JDK and configure the environment to start working in it. The rest is simple. Although the first installation of Android Studio may seem a bit confusing, you just have to follow the steps.

Google supports the installation of Android Studio on Windows, Mac, Linux or ChromeOS and offers extensive documentation and guides for this . The minimum hardware requirements for each platform are available in this same article. The emulator allows you to perform almost all  essential functions of a mobile phone with native installation , such as installing third-party applications, browsing the Internet or multimedia playback functions.

Obviously, it’s a partially functional tool for experimenting with a full Android installation. Slow compared to a real Android device, but usable for testing or just out of curiosity. However, like any kind of virtualization, it needs resources from your machine. If you use it on a good PC, give it as much as you can, especially RAM.