Google announces Android 12L: Optimized for folding screens and tablets

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In the past two years, the tablet market has become active again, and everyone no longer has only the iPad to choose from. Android mobile phone manufacturers including Samsung, Xiaomi, and OPPO have started to launch new tablets, but the software part has always been the weakness of Android tablets. Although the UI of each company has also been optimized, the software ecology is still almost meaningless. Now Google also hopes to promote the development of Android tablets. Google recently announced the Android 12L system, which is currently optimized for UI.

To say that ten years ago, when the tablet was the hottest period, Google launched the Android 3.0 Honeycomb specially designed for the tablet. But this almost became Android’s dark history, and now Google said on its official blog that due to the rise of folding screens and tablets in recent years, Google need to optimize for these two types of large-screen Android devices, so they made an Android 12L, and the L in the name seems to mean “Large”.

Compared with the regular version of Android 12, the main improvement of the new version of the system is the addition of an interface that is more conducive to large-screen viewing, including the home page, notification bar, lock screen, settings, etc. have been enlarged and more conducive to touch control, and in the main interface, a taskbar at the bottom has been added. This design is very similar to Apple’s iPadOS, mainly to make it easier to switch apps when the device is split-screened.

However, Google says that devices with Android 12L won’t arrive until later this year. Samsung, Microsoft, and Lenovo will have related folding screen phones and tablets, which are likely to be Samsung Galaxy Fold 4 and Microsoft’s Surface Duo 3, and even last year there were rumors that Google’s next-generation Pixel phone will be a folding screen.

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