Features and APIs Overview

Android 15 introduces great features and APIs for developers. The following sections summarize these features to help you get started with the related APIs.

For a detailed list of added, modified, and removed APIs, read the API diff report. For details on added APIs visit the Android API reference — for Android 15, look for APIs that were added in API level 35. To learn about areas where platform changes might affect your apps, be sure to check out Android 15 behavior changes for apps that target Android 15 and for all apps.

Camera and media

Android 15 includes a variety of features that improve the camera and media experience and that give you access to tools and hardware to support creators in bringing their vision to life on Android.

For more on the latest features and developer solutions for Android media and camera, see the Building modern Android media and camera experiences talk from Google I/O.

Low Light Boost

Android 15 introduces Low Light Boost, an auto-exposure mode available to both Camera 2 and the night mode camera extension. Low Light Boost adjusts the exposure of the Preview stream in low-light conditions. This is different from how the night mode camera extension creates still images, because night mode combines a burst of photos to create a single, enhanced image. While night mode works very well for creating a still image, it can't create a continuous stream of frames, but Low Light Boost can. Thus, Low Light Boost enables camera capabilities, such as:

  • Providing an enhanced image preview, so users are better able to frame their low-light pictures
  • Scanning QR codes in low light

If you enable Low Light Boost, it automatically turns on when there's a low light level, and turns off when there's more light.

Apps can record off the Preview stream in low-light conditions to save a brightened video.

For more information, see Low Light Boost.

In-app camera controls

Android 15 adds an extension for more control over the camera hardware and its algorithms on supported devices:

  • Advanced flash strength adjustments enabling precise control of flash intensity in both SINGLE and TORCH modes while capturing images.

HDR headroom control

Android 15 chooses HDR headroom that is appropriate for the underlying device capabilities and bit-depth of the panel. For pages that have lots of SDR content, such as a messaging app displaying a single HDR thumbnail, this behavior can end up adversely influencing the perceived brightness of the SDR content. Android 15 lets you control the HDR headroom with setDesiredHdrHeadroom to strike a balance between SDR and HDR content.

The brightness of SDR UI elements on the left screen appears to be more uniform than the brightness on the right screen, which simulates possible headroom issues when HDR and SDR content are mixed. By adjusting the HDR headroom, you can achieve a better balance between the SDR and HDR content.

Loudness control

Android 15 introduces support for the CTA-2075 loudness standard to help you avoid audio loudness inconsistencies and ensure users don't have to constantly adjust volume when switching between content. The system leverages known characteristics of the output devices (headphones and speaker) along with loudness metadata available in AAC audio content to intelligently adjust the audio loudness and dynamic range compression levels.

To enable this feature, you need to ensure loudness metadata is available in your AAC content and enable the platform feature in your app. For this, you instantiate a LoudnessCodecController object by calling its create factory method with the audio session ID from the associated AudioTrack; this automatically starts applying audio updates. You can pass an OnLoudnessCodecUpdateListener to modify or filter loudness parameters before they are applied on the MediaCodec.

// Media contains metadata of type MPEG_4 OR MPEG_D
val mediaCodec = …
val audioTrack = AudioTrack.Builder()
                                .setSessionId(sessionId)
                                .build()
...
// Create new loudness controller that applies the parameters to the MediaCodec
try {
   val lcController = LoudnessCodecController.create(mSessionId)
   // Starts applying audio updates for each added MediaCodec
}

AndroidX media3 ExoPlayer will also be updated to use the LoudnessCodecController APIs for a seamless app integration.

Virtual MIDI 2.0 devices

Android 13 added support for connecting to MIDI 2.0 devices using USB, which communicate using Universal MIDI Packets (UMP). Android 15 extends UMP support to virtual MIDI apps, enabling composition apps to control synthesizer apps as a virtual MIDI 2.0 device just like they would with an USB MIDI 2.0 device.

More efficient AV1 software decoding

dav1d logo

dav1d, the popular AV1 software decoder from VideoLAN is available for Android devices that don't support AV1 decode in hardware. dav1d is up to 3x more performant than the legacy AV1 software decoder, enabling HD AV1 playback for more users, including some low and mid tier devices.

Your app needs to opt-in to using dav1d by invoking it by name "c2.android.av1-dav1d.decoder". dav1d will be made the default AV1 software decoder in a subsequent update. This support is standardized and backported to Android 11 devices that receive Google Play system updates.

Developer productivity and tools

While most of our work to improve your productivity centers around tools like Android Studio, Jetpack Compose, and the Android Jetpack libraries, we always look for ways in the platform to help you more easily realize your vision.

OpenJDK 17 updates

Android 15 continues the work of refreshing Android's core libraries to align with the features in the latest OpenJDK LTS releases.

The following key features and improvements are included:

These APIs are updated on over a billion devices running Android 12 (API level 31) and higher through Google Play System updates, so you can target the latest programming features.

PDF improvements

Android 15 includes substantial improvements to the PdfRenderer APIs. Apps can incorporate advanced features such as rendering password-protected files, annotations, form editing, searching, and selection with copy. Linearized PDF optimizations are supported to speed local PDF viewing and reduce resource use. The Jetpack PDF library uses these APIs to simplify adding PDF viewing capabilities to your app.

The latest updates to PDF rendering include features such as searching an embedded PDF file.

The PdfRenderer has been moved to a module that can be updated using Google Play system updates independent of the platform release, and we're supporting these changes back to Android 11 (API level 30) by creating a compatible pre-Android 15 version of the API surface, called PdfRendererPreV.

Automatic language switching refinements

Android 14 added on-device, multi-language recognition in audio with automatic switching between languages, but this can cause words to get dropped, especially when languages switch with less of a pause between the two utterances. Android 15 adds additional controls to help apps tune this switching to their use case. EXTRA_LANGUAGE_SWITCH_INITIAL_ACTIVE_DURATION_TIME_MILLIS confines the automatic switching to the beginning of the audio session, while EXTRA_LANGUAGE_SWITCH_MATCH_SWITCHES deactivates the language switching after a defined number of switches. These options are particularly useful if you expect that there will be a single language spoken during the session that should be autodetected.

Improved OpenType Variable Font API

Android 15 improves the usability of the OpenType variable font. You can create a FontFamily instance from a variable font without specifying weight axes with the buildVariableFamily API. The text renderer overrides the value of wght axis to match the displaying text.

Using the API simplifies the code for creating a Typeface considerably:

Kotlin

val newTypeface = Typeface.CustomFallbackBuilder(
            FontFamily.Builder(
                Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf").build())
                    .buildVariableFamily())
    .build()

Java

Typeface newTypeface = Typeface.CustomFallbackBuilder(
            new FontFamily.Builder(
                new Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf").build())
                    .buildVariableFamily())
    .build();

Previously, to create the same Typeface, you would need much more code:

Kotlin

val oldTypeface = Typeface.CustomFallbackBuilder(
            FontFamily.Builder(
                Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf")
                    .setFontVariationSettings("'wght' 400")
                    .setWeight(400)
                    .build())
                .addFont(
                    Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf")
                        .setFontVariationSettings("'wght' 100")
                        .setWeight(100)
                        .build()
                )
                .addFont(
                    Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf")
                        .setFontVariationSettings("'wght' 200")
                        .setWeight(200)
                        .build()
                )
                .addFont(
                    Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf")
                        .setFontVariationSettings("'wght' 300")
                        .setWeight(300)
                        .build()
                )
                .addFont(
                    Font.Builder(assets, "RobotoFlex.ttf")
                        .setFontVariationSettings("'wght' 500")
                        .setWeight(500)
                        .build()
                )
                .addFont