Android 4.3

Android 4.3, Jelly Bean

Android 4.3, an even sweeter Jelly Bean, is available now on Nexus phones and tablets.

Restricted profiles limit access to apps and content, at home with your family and at work. Bluetooth Smart support makes Android ready for a whole new class of mobile apps that connect to fitness sensors. Games look great thanks to the 3D realistic, high performance graphics powered by OpenGL ES 3.0.

And there's a lot more new in this release:

Audio

• Virtual surround sound - enjoy movies from Google Play with surround sound on Nexus 7 (2013 edition) and other Nexus devices.
  Surround sound is powered by Fraunhofer Cingo™ mobile audio technology.

Dial pad

• Autocomplete - just start touching numbers or letters and the dial pad will suggest phone numbers or names. To turn on this feature, open your phone app settings and enable “Dial pad autocomplete.”
  

Graphics

• OpenGL ES 3.0 - Android now supports the latest version of the industry standard for high performance graphics.
• Wireless Display for Nexus 7 (2013 edition) and Nexus 10 - project from your tablet to a TV.

Internationalization and localization

• Additional language support - Android is now translated in Africaans, Amharic (አማርኛ), Hindi (हिंदी), Swahili (Kiswahili), and Zulu (IsiZulu).
• Hebrew, Arabic, and other RTL (right-to-left) - now supported in the home screen, settings, and Phone, People, and Keep apps.

Keyboard & input

• Easier text input - an improved algorithm for tap-typing recognition makes text input easier.
• Lower latency input for gamepad buttons and joysticks.

Location

• Location detection through Wi-Fi - use Wi-Fi to detect location without turning on Wi-Fi all the time.

Networking

• Bluetooth Smart support (a.k.a. Bluetooth Low-Energy) - devices like Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 (2013 edition) are now Bluetooth Smart Ready.
• Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3 support - display song names on a car stereo.

Settings

• Disabled apps tab - check which apps are disabled in Settings > Apps.

System

• Restricted profiles - put your tablet into a mode with limited access to apps and content.
• Setup wizard simplification - getting started on Android is easier thanks to the ability to correct previous input, and because of streamlined user agreements.
• Faster user switching - switching users from the lock screen is now faster.
• Enhanced photo daydream - navigate through interesting albums.

Create restricted profiles that limit access to apps

Android 4.2, Jelly Bean

Android 4.2, Jelly Bean improves on the speed and simplicity of Android 4.1 and includes all new features – Photo Sphere and a completely redesigned camera app, new Gesture Typing keyboard, Google Now with all new cards, and much more.

• Everything in Jelly Bean feels fast, fluid, and smooth. Moving between home screens and switching between apps is effortless, like turning the pages of a book.
• Jelly Bean improves performance throughout the system, including faster orientation changes, quicker switching between recent apps, and smoother and more consistent rendering across the system through vsync and triple buffering.
• Jelly Bean has more reactive and uniform touch responses, and makes your Android device even more responsive by boosting your device’s CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don’t need it to improve battery life.

Accessibility

• New Triple tap to enter full screen magnification when you enable 'Magnification gestures'.
• New Enable ‘TalkBack’, a screenreader for Android, right from the power menu.
• With Jelly Bean, blind or low vision users can use 'Gesture Mode' to reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
• With the new accessibility focus feature, you can move a cursor between controls to maintain a target for the next action or a source for the next navigation event. You can double tap anywhere to launch the current item with accessibility focus.
• Text traversal in accessibility now gives you more control – choose to move between pages, paragraphs, lines, words or characters.
• TalkBack now supports gestures to trigger actions, to navigate applications, and traverse text.
• Android now offers full support for braille accessibility services (download BrailleBack on Google Play).

Android Beam

• With Android Beam, introduced in Android 4.1, you can easily share your photos and videos via NFC.
• Instantly pair your Android phone or tablet to Bluetooth® devices like headsets or speakers that support the Simple Secure Pairing standard by just tapping them together.

Audio Accessories

• Support for USB audio docks.

Browser and WebView

• Browser has improved performance, CPU and memory efficiency. With better performance for animations and HTML5 canvases and an updated JavaScript Engine (V8), pages load faster and feel smoother.
• Browser now has better HTML5 video support, and has a new user experience. Just touch the video to play and pause, and smoothly transition into and out of fullscreen mode.
• Browser now supports the updated HTML5 Media Capture specification on input elements.
• WebView now supports vertical text, including Ruby Text and other vertical text glyphs.

Camera and Gallery

• New Android 4.2 features a completely redesigned camera app with new tools for taking photos.
• New High Dynamic Range or HDR mode (on supported devices) lets you see more detail in your shots by widening the exposure range.
• New A brand new photo editor features new filters, borders, and other tools to easily customize your photos.
• New With Photo Sphere you can take immersive 360º images and wide angle shots that you can view and share on your phone, tablet or desktop computer.
• New Access camera straight from your phone’s lock screen.
• To quickly review photos you’ve taken without leaving the camera app, you can swipe from the camera viewfinder. To start snapping photos again, just swipe back to the camera viewfinder.
• When viewing photos in Gallery, pinch to zoom out to enter 'filmstrip mode' for rapidly reviewing many pictures. In filmstrip mode you can swipe up or down to delete a photo. You can undo a deletion with a tap.
• When you tap to focus on an object there’s a new animation to show the focus state.

Clock

• New The clock has been totally redesigned with an all new look which includes both a digital and analog clock style.
• New You can use the new stopwatch to track time, count laps and splits, and share your times.
• New You can use the new timer to keep track of predetermined periods of time, run multiple timers at once, and even label your timers.
• New The world clock lets you check the time in different cities right from the Clock app or your lock screen.
• New New clock widgets let you choose from an analog or digital clock widget. You can also resize the digital clock widget to display the time in other cities around the world.

Data Usage

• You can now dismiss a data usage warning without changing the data warning threshold.
• To disable background data usage when your device is using a particular mobile hotspot, you can designate that SSID as being mobile.
• Android now automatically detects when one Jelly Bean device is tethered to another’s Wi-Fi hotspot, and intelligently enables or disables background data usage on that SSID.

Face Unlock

• Face Unlock is now even faster and more accurate, with smoother startup and animation.
• You can improve face matching accuracy by calibrating in different conditions and with different accessories (e.g. hat, glasses).
• Face Unlock can now optionally require a blink to verify that a live person is unlocking the device rather than a photo.

Graphics

• New Platform level support for new wireless display settings implemented on Nexus 4, including the ability to discover and connect to Miracast™ compatible devices via Wi-Fi Direct.
• New Full HDMI mirroring with notifications and multi-display support.

Internationalization

• New Android 4.2 brings improved font positioning, glyph cache performance, and more accurate placement of accents in Indic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and Latin font kerning.
• New New fonts have been added including Roboto Thin and Nanum Gothic for improved Korean font quality.
• Jelly Bean adds support for bidirectional text and more input languages to make the platform accessible to more people around the world.
• There is improved support for Arabic and Hebrew, including a new Arabic font, in the platform.
• You can now enter text in 18 new input languages including Persian, Hindi and Thai. Additional Indic languages Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam are now supported by the platform.
• Emoji from Unicode 6.0 are now supported.
• If the system language is set to Japanese, Japanese specific versions of glyphs are now properly rendered.

Keyboard

• New Android 4.2 introduces an all new Gesture Keyboard that lets you glide over letters to type a word while it dynamically predicts what you want to type.
• New French, English and Russian dictionaries are even more accurate and relevant, while new dictionaries have been added in Danish, Greek, Finnish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish and Turkish.
• The language model in Jelly Bean adapts over time and the keyboard features bigram prediction and correction.
• You can now switch languages quickly with the dedicated language selector key on keyboard.
• You can use custom keyboard input styles for more than 20 languages, with keymaps for QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, and PC styles.
• You can choose the input styles that you want to use for each keyboard, and use a hotkey to switch between them while typing.

Lock Screen

• New Android 4.2 lets you place widgets on your device's lock screen to give you faster access to your calendar, Gmail, SMS messages, and even third party app widgets.
• New Quickly launch Google Now by swiping up from the bottom edge of your secure lock screen.
• New Easily access camera straight from your phone’s lock screen.

Messaging and Talk

• New Support for group messaging via MMS.
• New notifications display the full text of incoming SMS messages and when you receive an MMS you can view the full photo in the notification.
• When entering recipients for an SMS or MMS a new UI collects recipients as chips, making it easier to compose messages.
• Talk features a new notification style.

Notifications

• You can now take action on notifications directly from the notifications shade.
• Notifications from the same application are grouped together, and the first item is automatically expanded. You can also pinch notifications to expand or collapse them.
• You now get an image preview in notifications after taking a screenshot. You can quickly share the screenshot directly from the notification.
• On 7” tablets you can lock automatic display rotation from the notifications shade.
• For Wi-Fi only devices, quickly see the SSID of the access point you're connected to from the notifications shade.
• You can now touch-hold a notification to identify the application that created it and turn off notifications from that application if needed, or uninstall the application.

Networking

• New Wi-Fi Direct support has been improved, so your device can now remember other devices.
• New Faster captive portal detection on Wi-Fi, cellular connections, and pay-as-you-go SIMs.
• Wi-Fi protected setup is now supported with WPS push button & PIN support.
• A new setting lets you stay on mobile data and avoid nearby Wi-Fi networks with poor connections.

News and Weather

• News and Weather has been enhanced to provide more frequent news updates whilst reducing power consumption.

People

• The People app is more buttery with smoother animations and improved search performance.
• The People app now retrieves high res photos automatically for Google contacts with public Google+ profiles and displays higher res photos (720x720) on certain devices.
• High res photos set on Google accounts will be backed up and synced across devices.
• The People app has a new 7” tablet layout.
• You can now quickly add your favorite contacts to a home screen, directly from the contact's details page.
• The People app helps you organize your contacts and reduces duplicates with an Improved auto-joining algorithm.
• You can now clear the frequently contacted list from the People app’s favorites tab.

Phone

• New Use the phone app in landscape orientation or while in a car dock.
• New With new filtering options you can quickly manage and review your call log.
• New Improved TalkBack support with a single tap dialpad.
• When you miss a call, a new notification lets you return the call or reply by SMS.
• Incoming visual voicemails are displayed in a new notification that lets you play the message with a single touch.
• During a call a new notification lets you hang up with one touch.
• As part of Project Butter, the dial pad is more responsive. Call log scrolling is smoother, and swiping between tabs in Phone is quick and fluid.
• You can clear your frequently contacted list in the favorite tab of Phone.
• You can now add phone numbers from the call log to existing, read-only contacts.

Settings

• New Access Settings by tapping the Quick Settings icon in the notification shade, or swipe down from the top right on tablets or with two fingers on phones to access settings.
• New Now quickly toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with a long press in Quick Settings.
• Accounts are now displayed in the primary Settings view so you can easily see all the accounts you're signed into on your device.
• You can now easily access all Google Privacy Settings in one place by selecting your Google account from Settings.

System

• New New 10-inch tablet UI which lets you quickly access your favorite apps from any homescreen and gives improved access to your notifications.
• New New multi-user support for tablets lets different users have their own separate, customizable spaces on a single device.
• New Tablets can now support up to eight users. Three users can be active at a time, and they can all sync data like email at the same time and even reuse apps if another user has them installed.
• New A new display mode ‘Daydream’ allows apps to display interactive screensavers - like a photo album or a Currents stream when your tablet or phone isn’t being used.
• New App permissions are now clearer and more intuitive.
• New Android 4.2 introduces a new app verification service (for devices that have Google Play installed) that provides enhanced security along with always-on VPN.
• New You'll now receive a warning before an app tries to send SMS messages that may cost you money.
• New Improved security for devices with debugging enabled - you can enable debugging for each new debugging client.
• Device encryption is now more reliable, and periodically reminds you to decrypt your device. SMS messages and calls are now declined when waiting for decryption.
• You can long press the ‘Power Off’ option in the power menu to boot your device to safe mode.
• A new ‘Reset app preferences’ button lets you quickly manage default applications for specific activities, background data restrictions, notification suppression, and more.
• A redesigned dialog with larger icons lets you intuitively choose your preferred application for specific activities.
• Google Apps Device Policy on your device may now override the ‘keep screen awake’ option from developer settings.

Text-to-speech

• Jelly Bean introduces a new conversational text-to-speech voice in US English, available as both a network engine and an embedded engine via the TTS API.

Voice Typing

• A new embedded speech recognizer lets you use Voice Typing even when you don't have an Internet connection.

Widgets

• Jelly Bean makes it easier to personalize your home screen. As you place widgets on the screen, everything else automatically moves to make room.
• When they're too big, widgets resize on their own. If you choose to resize a widget, apps and widgets will now also move out of the way.
• You can now quickly remove apps or widgets from any home screen by picking them up and flinging them to the edge of the screen.
• Launching apps and returning back home are now faster and smoother.