Android 12 Developer Preview 3 hands-on - Verified links to the rescue - Android

There are other small visual changes to the UI, including a slightly thicker font used in the At a Glance widget on the home screen and a new splash screen when launching apps that now reflects your preference for light or dark themes and can even borrow from the background color of an app icon if available, making for a more cohesive overall feel.

Search bar in widget selector screen

In Developer Preview 2, we saw Google revamp the widget selector screen, accessed by long-pressing a blank space on the home screen. The newly alphabetized and vertically scrolling list of widgets is far easier to navigate than in previous versions of Android, and with DP3, it's even easier to find specific widgets thanks to the addition of a search bar at the top of the list.

Of course, you can search for the name of an app to pull up all of its accompanying widgets, but this search bar can even parse the names of the individual widgets themselves. For example, searching for "data" can instantly find the Data Usage Widget from the Google Fi app.

Refreshed screenshot tools

When taking a screenshot in DP3, you can now swipe the preview image away from either direction, rather than just left like in Developer Preview 2. This isn't a terribly significant change, but with how many times I've tried swiping them to the right in DP2, it's a welcome change as far as I'm concerned.

In addition, the Markup tool for annotating screenshots has been updated with new fonts, totaling up to 5, though we're still missing scrolling screenshots — at least, without digging into feature flags.

Improved accessibility mode

A huge benefit of the Android 12 Developer Preview builds has been improvements to accessibility features, including a new floating shortcut bubble that takes the place of the previous two-finger swipe shortcut. You can reposition the new accessibility button to anywhere you'd like along the edges of the screen, then tap it at any time to open a menu of large shortcuts, including Google Assistant, volume up and down, brightness up and down, and the power menu.

You can adjust the size of this floating bubble from your phone's accessibility settings menu or set it to fade when not in use, with a slider to adjust the transparency levels.

Improved default link behavior

There are few things as annoying when setting up a new Android phone than the constant dialog boxes when tapping a link, asking which app you'd like to open the link with. In Android 12 DP3, Google tackles this nuisance with new default link behavior that assigns particular apps to open "verified links" from trusted sites automatically. This new behavior replaces the "Open supported links" setting from DP2. While you'll presumably be able to add your own verified links eventually, the option is still grayed out within the settings for now.

More prominent counter for grouped notifications

Android 12's notification management system has seen a number of revisions in the Developer Preview builds, and in DP3, they've made the counter for grouped notifications more prominent, now integrated with the expansion arrow in the upper righthand corner of a notification group and matched to your system accent color.

This isn't a particularly huge overhaul, but it certainly helps improve visibility in certain situations. In DP2, the notification counter text was colored based on the corresponding app icon, which often lacked cohesion and proper contrast with the rest of the UI. This is a nice, subtle step towards a more consistent look.