Google announced the first developer preview of Android 16 to accelerate rollouts of features in the devices.

It's a pretty significant shift in the Android timeline of rollout, since in the last two or three years, it rolled out the first developer beta for Android in Q2, with the final stable version landing after July. Under the revised schedule, the stable version of Android 16 will see release in Q2 2025.

Possibly, this move by Google would make it wish to reduce fragmentation: when running on different Android versions, different devices. This structure would also probably allow iOS competitors to make core Android features available to more users quickly.

However, Google should ensure that the first major release of Android 16 is stable enough so developers do not have to wait for a while before building something on top of it without the fear that their applications will break.

The company added that aside from its major SDK version release in Q2 2025, it will also publish a minor SDK release in Q4 2025 with new developer APIs, possibly to allow developers to gain access to the release of features and functionality on an accelerated basis.

“We’re planning the major release a quarter earlier (Q2 rather than Q3 in prior years) to better align with the schedule of device launches across our ecosystem, so more devices can get the major release of Android sooner,” Matthew McCullough, VP of product management for Android Developer ecosystem, said in a blog post.

Feature-wise, the first developer preview of Android 16 presented an embedded photo picker for apps. With this functionality, apps can ask users to get access to selected photos from both local storage and the cloud.

Google also plans to release a developer preview of Health Connect with APIs for health records, which means apps will be able to read and write medical records in the FHIR format — a standard for exchanging health records between different systems — with user permission.

In September 2023, the company unveiled the Google Pixel 8 series, followed by the Google Pixel 9 Series in August 2024. The Pixel 9 received Android 15 treatment in October this year. It is not known if Google would continue with these two API release per year models for subsequent releases and how they may impact the Pixel release cycle.

When in October, Seang Chau told the Android Faithful podcast that the company's older way of doing point releases and API release schedule was indeed even problematic for developers as well as for device manufacturers to keep up with, then the new cycle will bring about a major API change earlier in the year, while adding APIs only for the Q4 2025 release so that developers do not face any issues.