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Another year, another Google I/O developer conference. Building on , the I/O Conference 2024 clearly shows Google building on and improving its AI features, with the tech company’s smartphone operating system, , also a big star of the show. Here are some of the new Android 15 features that we can look forward to.  has to be one of the major highlights of Android 15. Building on existing search functions for photos, you’ll be able to look for specific shots more easily, thanks to Gemini, Google’s AI model. Prompts like “Show me the best cat photos I’ve taken over the last year” will be able to pull up , instead of just showing every single photo that has a cat inside.  That’s not all the AI Google is putting into Android 15, though. , a feature which launched at previously, has been updated with . Google’s is also included in Android 15, and plenty of other AI features are also coming to Android smartphones. Users will get more control over camera hardware on supported devices, with upgrades to allowing apps to tweak settings including boosting the brightness of the preview image, flash intensity adjustments and more. is also introduced in Android 15, allowing for enhanced capabilities like scanning QR codes in low light. on Android 15 will allow the device to choose HDR headroom depending on the content. For example, if there’s a webpage with mostly SDR content and a single HDR image, it could negatively affect the perceived brightness of the content. Therefore, apps can now set their desired headroom to avoid such issues. Pixel devices will soon be able to be a proper option for PC users, with a new High-Quality Webcam mode available when the USB webcam feature is activated on a Pixel phone. Activating this HQ mode disables any power optimisations and significantly improves video quality, although it comes with the downside of increased battery drain and heat output. If your phone’s running low on storage, Android 15’s new feature could just be a godsend. Instead of having to uninstall an app completely and possibly lose user data, Android 15 will be able to archive an installed app package to remove the APK and cached files while retaining user data. If an archived app is tapped on, it can download the working files again and unarchive the app without losing user data.  With phone hacking and scams becoming more common, digital security on our phones needs to be beefed up. Some apps do it a little more securely with in-app notifications and verifications, but plenty of services still use the standard text or email, which can be intercepted and viewed via screen recordings or screen share. Android 15 will attempt to protect against that with a new feature that prevents malicious Android apps from reading one-time passwords (OTP).  If you’ve ever handed your phone to a friend or family member, you might have been worried about them accessing private information. The new feature to be created on a phone that can be locked with a separate PIN, providing .  On the safety side of things, Android 15’s new feature uses AI to , locking the screen quickly. If the phone is disconnected for a prolonged period of time or if excessive failed unlock attempts are made, Offline Device Lock will automatically lock the screen even if the device isn’t connected. If your phone has been stolen and you can’t remotely lock or wipe it via Find My Device because you can’t remember your Google account credentials, the new feature will allow you to and a security challenge so you have time to recover the account details and access more options.  Thanks to , the built-in, on-device foundation model, Android 15 is able to provide   if conversation patterns associated with scams are detected. This processing happens on-device, so conversations will be kept private. Under the hood, there are a bunch of new changes as well.  For workaholics, the has been improved, with apps being able to use features like rendering password-protected files, annotations, form editing and more with faster local PDF viewing. These changes are supported all the way back to Android 11, which is nice. Another QOL feature is , which allows for two apps to be paired together so that they open together by default in a split-screen combo.  Android 15 also improves on the (ADPF), a set of APIs that allow games and intensive apps to interact more directly with Android devices' power and thermal systems. New capabilities have been added, such as a power-efficiency mode that plays nicely with long-running background workloads.  There’s now support for the via VideoLAN's dAV1d AV1 software decoder, meaning that devices that don’t have built-in AV1 hardware will still be able to decode relevant video content.  Payments are set to be smoother as well, with Android 15’s new APIs allowing Android devices to listen to NFC readers without responding, thus making payment verifications possible . Android 15 Beta 2 is now out for testing, and we reckon it'll be ready for a general roll out before the Pixel 9 shows up later this year. Source: Google ( ) ( )