It feels like Android 12 has just been released, and the new OS still hasn’t made its way onto the vast majority of phones out there. But Google’s development cycle calls for a new Android version every year, and to ensure it’s free of bugs and applications are ready for it, the company usually opens up developer previews in February or March, with more fully-featured betas following later in the year. Given the open-source nature of Android and the fact that there are so many people involved in the massive project, there are quite a few things we already know about Android 13 long before its official release date.
Codename
All Android versions used to come with delicious, sweets-based codenames; remember Android 4.4 KitKat or Android 9 Pie? While Google doesn’t use these codenames for marketing purposes anymore, its developers still use them internally. For Android 13, this name appears to be Tiramisu, following up on the not-publicly used Snow Cone for Android 12, Red Velvet Cake for Android 11, and Android 10’s Quince Tart.
Tap-to-transfer
Remember Android Beam, which allowed you to tap two phones to send links, files, and more to each other? It was replaced with Nearby Share, which doesn’t rely on NFC technology but instead on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct. But this tap-to-transfer method is just too handy and intuitive to vanish into Nirvana, and it looks like Google wants to resurrect it. As we exclusively covered, a similar method for sharing and playing media is bound to return to Android 13. At the moment, it’s codenamed “Media TTT” (tap to transfer), but it’s unlikely that Google will market it under this name.
