Google released the second Android 12 beta earlier today, and the new build brings loads of privacy features that Google announced at its I/O developer conference last month. As always, there are also lots of undocumented changes in the release, and if you're interested in learning about them, I have a running tweet thread that I'm continuously adding to.

While I'm working on a post summarizing all the changes we've found (there's a lot to go over!), I wanted to highlight some of the hidden changes that I found in Android 12 Beta 2. While analyzing the Settings APK, I discovered that Google has gated a new page transition animation behind a feature flag. This flag, once enabled, changes the transition animation to use the shared x-axis animation detailed in Google's Material Design guidelines. This animation currently only applies to the Settings app and not any other system or third-party apps installed on the device.

Normal Settings page transition animation in Android 12 Beta 2:

New shared x-axis Settings page transition animation in Android 12 Beta 2:

[video width="303" height="624" mp4="https://static1.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Android-12-Beta-2-X-Motion-Animation.mp4"]

It's strange to see this animation being tested now when it's not new and wasn't a major focus of the Material You announcement, but I quite like the x-axis transition and hope it sticks around. This animation, as I mentioned, is currently gated behind a flag and thus isn't enabled by default in Android 12 Beta 2. We don't know if this shared x-axis transition animation will become the default for the Settings app in a future beta release, but there aren't many beta releases left so we won't have to wait long to find out (there are just 2 betas left until the stable release comes out later this year).