In addition to releasing the Android 12 Developer Preview for smartphones and tablets, the preview is also available for Android TV.
This is actually quite a bit surprising, since Android TV doesn’t typically get the developer preview on the same day. It’s typically a few months later on. And the final release is also usually much later on. Perhaps, we’ll be seeing a more uniform release among all Android device types this year.
There’s not a lot of details on what’s new with Android 12 for Android TV, however, Google does mention that developers can test their Android TV apps on Android 12, and also test it on the all-new Google TV experience. Which does appear to be coming to more Android TV devices in 2021.
If you’re a developer, you can install the Android TV developer preview on your ADT-3 developer kit. It unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be available for other Android TV devices. You can get your own ADT-3 device here.
Android 12 for Android TV
Google hasn’t detailed a lot of the changes for Android 12 in general. So far, most of the changes are under-the-hood. Which makes sense since this is a developer preview and not a beta yet. So it is not focused on user-facing features just yet. That will likely come later on.
We should be seeing Android 12 available for Android TV around September, if Google is indeed looking for a more uniform release here. But like with smartphones, it’ll still depend on how fast partners can roll out the update. Sony, Hisense and others are typically pretty slow with rolling out updates to their Android TV devices. But the NVIDIA SHIELD TV will likely get it pretty quickly.
You can read more about Android 12 by clicking here. We expect to see another preview before we move onto beta, and the final release should come in September.