Stable Android TV 13 is here… But only for the ADT-3 development kit made by Google itself. The company quietly “announced” it by updating its developer page. The first Betas had started circulating in recent months, always on the ADT dev kits. At the moment there is no concrete information on when the update could arrive on televisions, boxes and dongles regularly available in the consumer market, however it should be noted that having the newest version of the operating system is much less crucial in the TV sector. This is demonstrated by the official list of new highlights:
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Media and energy
- Anticipatory Audio Route allows apps to identify the routed device and supported formats before creating an AudioTrack
- User controls for preferred resolutions and refresh rate on supported HDMI devices
- Improvements in low power standby energy management
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Input control and accessibility
- The states of the hardware silent mode are shown in the privacy controls of the system
- Updated the user controls for accessing the Assistant microphone on the remote
- Global preferences to enable audio descriptions across all apps
- New Keyboard Layouts API to select different layouts on external keyboards
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HDMI and tuner
- Better handling of HDMI status changes in HDMI connected sources
- Improved language selection for HDMI sources
- Version 2.0 of the tuner HAL with performance enhancements, dual receiver support and ISDB-T Multi-Layer support
- Framework for using Interactive TV as an extension of TIF (Android TV Input Framework)
ADT-3 has been discontinued for some time now; at the moment, in fact, Google does not offer any new dev kits. Rumors about a hypothetical ADT-4 have come out relatively recently, but for now the company has not made any official announcements. To have an extremely vague and general indication, observing what happened in the past, it can be estimated that the OS will arrive on the first consumer devices in about a year.
