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🚀 Good morning! Android 13’s codename is delicious, and Elon Musk has crazy ambitions for space and Mars, of course. On with the day!

Android 13

Lucky Android 13 is here! Android dessert officially codename Tiramisu was announced as ready to download as a developer preview at 1PM ET yesterday. Developers and enthusiasts with a spare Pixel are now able to load the early test version up from that moment to get a look at what’s to come from Android.

• Loading it up on your personal daily driver, I’ve found, is an exercise in futility: expect crashes, bugs, weird disconnections, and lots of bug fixes rolled out along with new versions.
• I absolutely won’t put it on my Pixel 4a 5G until the first true beta arrives, which based on the Android timeline, is sometime in the back half of March, and even then, you’ll need to accept a less than perfectly stable experience — again, that’s the whole point of a beta.
• But, um, if you want, here’s how to install it.

What’s new:

• A lot of what Google is prepping isn’t really out of the kitchen yet, but developers can already start to prepare.
• Google’s advancements in privacy continue: there’s a new way to give apps just a few photos or files rather than access to everything on your device as is the default now. It’s being called Photo Picker.
• But it’ not just coming to Android 13: Google is also hard at work making bigger updates to older versions of Android via Google Play system updates, meaning your old-but-still-gold OnePlus 5T will get improvements, even if it doesn’t get new Android versions. So, Photo Picker will roll out to older devices, too.
• Other stuff: a new Wi-Fi permission so apps can get Wi-Fi without locations, better Material You theming so that even app icons change colors with your wallpaper, per-app languages to set one language for the system but one language for specific apps, and more.
• Also uncovered: support for two homescreen layouts meaning support for one screen on foldables and a different layout for the inside of a foldable, updates to Now Playing notification, new Quick Settings tiles, and more.
• More and more will be added as we get closer to release and this post is tracking everything we know about Android 13, which will grow and grow.
• But the important thing to know is you’re not missing out, yet. Android 13 also doesn’t look like it’s going for a major design change but more will add further refinements plus foldable considerations, and keep things ticking along nicely.
• (I read a Spanish to English translation that said “Android will get fatter as its final release in September approaches” which is also a good summary!)

Roundup

📸 Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra camera test: Check out these quick look photo samples (Android Authority).

🤖 “A robot bought my seven-year-old car for more than I paid brand-new.” Wow. Seven years old! Car prices are nuts, but the detail here is exceptional. Great read. (The Verge).

🚀 SpaceX Starship event recap: Elon Musk talks Mars missions, ambitious goals as always, including a future “where Starships could be built every three days,” and more in megarocket update (CNET).

🥗 “Is the stomach basically a constant ‘vat of acid’ that the food we eat just plops into and starts breaking down or do the stomach walls simply secrete the acids rapidly when needed?” (r/askscience).

Friday Fun

I’m a sucker for a decoding job and there’s a fun write-up of the decoding of a 160-year-old letter written by Charles Dickens, which has been solved thanks to some classic internet crowd-sourced efforts.

• The nature of things is that Dickens would write in a fairly cryptic looking shorthand. (He wasn’t trying to be cryptic, just efficient!)
• Anyway, if you take one look at the sample it’s unreadable, hence the efforts required to help unearth more Dickens.
• The crowd-sourced transcription is now 70% complete (meaning you can still get involved if you really, really want), and an IT guy in California won the competition (worth £300 GBP, not bad) which was started to drive efforts.
• But perhaps less exciting than a new short story, it reveals a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London regarding some ongoing dealings between Dickens, his publisher that he was at war with, and The Times.
• Dickens won, by the way.

Decode this: Vjrrtd!

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.