I flashed the Android 12 Beta onto my Pixel about ten minutes after the I/O keynote wrapped up Tuesday night, which in hindsight was maybe not my smartest move on a work night. I've been living with it for two days now and I have thoughts, some of them contradictory.
The headline feature is "Material You," which is Google's fancy name for the thing where the OS looks at your wallpaper and builds a whole color palette out of it, then applies that palette to your quick settings, your lock screen clock, your notification shade, basically everything Google controls. I put on a photo of a sunset I took in Ella back when travel was still a normal thing people did, and the whole phone shifted into these warm orange and rust tones. It's genuinely kind of lovely. I did not expect to care about this. I've rolled my eyes at "personalization" features for a decade because usually it means a wallpaper picker and nothing else, but this is different because it's systemic, the color logic touches nearly every first-party surface at once.
That's the good part. Here's the part that's going to annoy anyone who installs this expecting a finished product: almost nothing outside Google's own apps has caught up yet. Open Spotify or Slack or basically any third-party app and you get this jarring seam where half your screen is dressed in your new sunset palette and the other half is whatever that app shipped with in March. It's not a bug exactly, it's just how a beta 1 release goes, but it does make the whole thing feel less like a redesign and more like a preview of a redesign that'll actually land in October or whenever the stable release ships.
Setting it up was easier than I remembered from previous beta cycles. Google's got this Android Flash Tool now that runs right in Chrome, no need to install the SDK platform tools or mess with fastboot commands by hand, you just plug in the phone, authorize it, and the browser does the flashing for you. Took maybe eight minutes including the reboot. I will say the tool is oddly picky about which USB port I use, my left port just refuses to see the device and I have no idea why, but that's a me problem and not a Google problem.
A few other things from the two days:
- Notification permissions feel noticeably more locked down. Apps have to actually ask now instead of just grabbing whatever access they want, which is nice, though I've already had one app (won't name it, it's a podcast player) just silently stop notifying me because I guess it assumed I'd approve something I never saw a prompt for.
- The new widgets look better, rounder corners, more padding, but I still don't use widgets so this is wasted on me personally. I know some people love their home screen full of them. I am not one of those people and never will be.
- Battery life on beta software is, predictably, worse. Not dramatically, but I went from usually ending the day around 30% to closer to 18% doing the exact same stuff. This always happens with early builds and always recovers, so I'm not worried, just noting it for anyone deciding whether to flash their daily driver phone.
If you're thinking about jumping on the beta yourself: back up first, obviously, and know that going back to stable Android later means a full wipe, there's no clean downgrade path. I learned that the hard way on a previous beta cycle a few years back and lost some app data I cared about, so this time I actually did the backup properly before flashing.
Overall I like where this is going more than I expected to. Google's design language has felt kind of frozen since the Material Design refresh years ago, all the same teal accents and card shadows everywhere you looked, and this is the first time in a while an Android release has made me want to poke around the settings menu just to see what else changed color. Ask me again in a month once more apps have updated and the seams aren't so obvious.