According to recent commits submitted to AOSP (Android Open Source Project), Android 13 could gain complete support for Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio.
The revelation comes from Mishaal Rahman, who detailed the new changes in a tweet (via XDA). Google has basically combined an LC3 encoder while also adding this codec as an option within Developer options. “It’ll be the highest priority A2DP source codec,” Rahman claims.
There’s still some ambiguity about whether this is sufficient to enable full Bluetooth LE Audio support. But Rahman opines that it will be ready in time for the release of Android 13 in a few months from now. Based on the unveiling of Android 12 earlier this year, it’s likely that Google will reveal Android 13 at I/O 2022.
Bluetooth LE Audio allows users to broadcast audio streams to multiple devices simultaneously
Bluetooth LE Audio consumes significantly lower power than the Classic (BR/EDR) audio standard. It can bring multistream audio plus the ability to broadcast audio via Bluetooth to several devices. Additionally, Bluetooth LE Audio could also integrate with hearing aids in the future to offer better accessibility options to consumers.
It’s easy to confuse Bluetooth LE with LE Audio. The former has been around for a few years, whereas LE Audio was unveiled by Bluetooth SIG at CES 2020 along with the new Bluetooth 5.2 standard. Though Android 12 has partial support for this feature, it now seems like customers would have to wait until the next iteration of Google’s operating system to take full advantage of LE Audio’s capabilities.
While there hasn’t been a lot of information on Android 13 so far, leaks have told us what to expect. We learned last week about Google adding a new toggle inside Developer Options to disable the monitoring of “Phantom Processes.”
Google changed up a few things with regard to app management on the latest Android release. Moreover, Android 12’s PhantomProcesskiller restricts users’ ability to run multiple operations in the background. This can diminish the functionality of apps like Termux. Thankfully, this could be fixed with Android 13, reportedly codenamed Tiramisu.
A few smartphones are still waiting for the Android 12 update, so its successor is still some distance away. Hopefully, future leaks will give us a better understanding of Google’s upcoming mobile operating system.
2021-12-23 15:04:39