The Fold 3 is wider than that, which brings up the standard Android issue of it looking ugly on wide devices. If Google is using two side-by-side phone interfaces, it sure seems like the correct aspect ratio for that would be double the width of a normal phone. The thing is, the Fold seems way too wide for the design that's happening here. XDA's example screenshots use a Galaxy Fold 3 aspect ratio, which is currently our best guess for what a Pixel foldable will look like. Every screenshot is just two phone interfaces next to each other. This new design emulates the layout split-screen mode for apps, with a right-down-the-middle 50/50 split. Honeycomb had something close to a 33/66 split for app layouts, usually a slimmer navigation panel on the left and a larger content area on the right. Google's first swing at a bigger Android interface was in Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and that was designed for widescreen tablets. The notification panel takes a similar approach, with the quick settings on the left and the normal list of notifications on the right.Īll of these dual-pane interfaces use a 50/50 split, which is very different from how Google used to do things. The settings screen is back to a dual-pane configuration, which has the top-level settings list on the left and each individual page of settings on the right. Like the good (and quickly abandoned) Android tablet interfaces of yore, Android 12.1 sees Google return to dual-pane layouts for various bits of the OS interface. We want to stress the "early" part of that "early code" description, because everything looks horrible, but we're here for functionality, not design, right now. XDA Developers' Mishaal Rahman has a hands-on with some early code, detailing a ton of tablet and foldable-centric features.
So what's in Android 12.1? Foldables stuff. Everyone is unofficially calling that release "Android 12.1," following the maintenance release naming conventions Google last used with Android 8.1, which was released in December 2017.
Google made a space in between Android 12 and 13 for a new release. Android 12 is "API level 31," but Android 13-due out this time next year-was recently bumped to API level 33 in the public Android repository. Unlike the marketing-controlled version number, the API level is designed to be predictable and goes up "1" for each new platform release, regardless of the size of each release. Every Android release gets an API level for app developers. There's nothing official about the name "Android 12.1," but the puzzle pieces here aren't hard to fit together.