Android 15 is barely out of the oven, but like any effective kitchen, the next recipe is already cooking. The first developer preview of Android 16 rolled out to users on November 19, featuring upgrades that Google didn’t mention in its initial announcement.
This version is called Android 16 DP1 (short for Developer Preview 1) and adds three new features, including Audio Sharing, a Privacy Dashboard, and a new way to handle notifications, according to 9to5Google. As with any preview, this software is still in early development. It could change or features could vanish completely before it officially launches, so don’t get too attached to anything just yet.
The biggest upgrade is the Privacy Dashboard. You can now review a week’s worth of data instead of just 24 hours’ worth, which makes it easier to spot apps that have been accessing permissions they aren’t supposed to.
Next up is the Audio Sharing feature. Users first noticed this in Android 15, but the feature can’t currently be activated. It’s an interesting perk — it allows you to share audio to more than one Bluetooth device at a time, so you and a friend can now watch something together without awkwardly swapping earbuds.
The last new feature is called Notification Cooldown. As its name suggests, it will gradually reduce the volume of notifications from the same app within a given window of time. That means a particularly busy group chat will no longer buzz your phone off the table like an out-of-control washing machine. Like Audio Sharing, this was an Android 15 feature that wasn’t fully cooked.
Note that these features only appear in the Android 16 Developer Preview. Unless you’re interested in digging into the Android code and figuring out what cool tricks are in development, this update is mostly for developers and can pose many stability problems for phones. Still, it’s an exciting glimpse at what’s to come and what we can get our hands on once Android 16 is in a more stable state.
