The Fourth Beta of Android 17

Posted by Dan Galpin, Developer Relations EngineerAndroid 17 has reached beta 4, the last scheduled beta of this release cycle, a critical milestone for app compatibility and platform stability. Whether you're fine-tuning your app's user experience, ensuring smooth edge-to-edge rendering, or leveraging the newest APIs, Beta 4 provides the near-final environment you need to be testing with. Get your apps, libraries, tools, and game engines ready! If you develop an Android SDK, library, tool, or game engine, it's critical to prepare any necessary updates now to prevent your downstream app and game developers from being blocked by compatibility issues and allow them to target the latest SDK features. Please let your downstream developers know if updates are needed to fully support Android 17. Testing involves installing your production app or a test app making use of your library or engine using Google Play or other means onto a device or emulator running Android 17 Beta 4. Work through all your app's flows and look for functional or UI issues. Each release of Android contains platform changes that improve privacy, security, and overall user experience; review the app impacting behavior changes for apps running on and targeting Android 17 to focus your testing, including the following: Resizability on large screens: Once you target Android 17, you can no longer opt out of maintaining orientation, resizability and aspect ratio constraints on large screens. Dynamic code loading: If your app targets Android 17 or higher, the Safer Dynamic Code Loading (DCL) protection introduced in Android 14 for DEX and JAR files now extends to native libraries. All native files loaded using System.load() must be marked as read-only. Otherwise, the system throws UnsatisfiedLinkError. Enable...

Original source: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/04/the-fourth-beta-of-android-17.html
Publisher: Android Developers Blog