Android 16 is here and there are already a bunch of fun new features to try out, but more are on the way.
You can actually try some of them right now thanks to Android Canary, Google’s brand new delivery mechanism for upcoming feature testing for Android. Per 9to5Google, the first Android Canary update is here, bringing with it a small handful of minor new features. They aren’t big, game-changing additions, but they do sound nice. Here are three you should try.
Before we get started, a brief word of warning: Installing unfinished Android builds on your personal device can be dangerous for reasons that I hope are obvious. Do it at your own risk.
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1. Hide the AI button
Easily the most appealing new feature in the latest Android Canary update to me, personally, is the ability to hide the AI button from the Pixel search bar that sits on your phone’s home screen. Typically, the search bar just has two buttons: One for voice search and one for photo search. These days, there’s a third button that activates AI mode, but a new toggle in the settings menu lets you turn that off entirely so you never accidentally press it.
2. Enhanced HDR
It’s not clear yet how profound an effect it has, but there’s a new “Enhanced HDR Brightness” toggle in the settings menu that is supposed to improve image quality on anything that supports HDR. Specifically, as its name suggests, HDR content should be brighter after you turn this on. HDR is great when configured correctly, but it can sometimes produce dimmer images, so this is a good setting to have, assuming it works.
3. A new, separate parental controls menu
This last one is less a new feature and more a reorganization of the settings menu, but there’s now a dedicated “Parental Controls” menu where there wasn’t before. Previously, parental controls were bundled into the “Digital Wellbeing” menu, which still exists, but is now separate from parental controls. Again, it doesn’t seem like there are any new parental control options at the moment, but it’s nice that this is now its own separate part of the settings menu.
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