Google has released the second developer preview of Android 15, bringing with it a series of new features, such as the highly anticipated support for satellite connectivity, and various improvements in contactless payments, multilingual recognition, and interaction with PDF files through apps, among others.
Android’s compatibility with satellite messaging has been in the works for about a year now, and it seems that Android 15 is going to release the feature for apps. The new mobile operating system includes notifications and improved indicators in the status bar when you are connected via satellite.
An “NonTerrestrialNetwork” API will allow apps to know when they are limited to barely existing satellite connectivity. Google claims that Android 15 will allow third-party SMS and MMS apps to take advantage of satellite connectivity APIs, but enhanced messaging with RCS support will be limited only to “preloaded” apps.
In addition, this new preview introduces screen recording detection so that apps can notify the user if their activity is being recorded. It also improves the reliability of contactless payments with a single touch for apps that use NFC, and enhances multilingual audio recognition introduced in Android 14 to prevent words from being lost when the user changes language.
Finally, Android’s compatibility with PDF can vary greatly depending on the device you have, so Android 15 is including some major improvements in integrated PDF rendering, which will be a separate module so that it can be updated through the Play Store. Google says that this version of Android 15 is receiving “advanced features such as rendering password-protected files, annotations, form editing, search, and copy selection”.
