Android’s open-source nature has helped propel it to the status of the most popular smartphone operating system in the world. But that also means that there are so many devices out there running the OS that keeping them updated with the latest version is a gargantuan task. Google has been trying to do something about this for years now, but the update situation continues to remain a mess. Acting on that, the company is now trying something new and has just released the first public version of the Extension SDK, aiming to bring features of the latest Android versions to older versions.

As part of the announcement, Google is opening up Photo Picker API support to Android 12 and Android 11. Photo Picker was introduced with Android 13 and lets users give access to only recent images on their device (or cloud), rather than potential access to all files via the usual document picker.

Only Android 13 has it right now, but with this release from Google, developers will be able to include support for the new Photo Picker in their apps. Since it’s an app-side thing, no system update will be necessary to see the tool.

Not everything with this release is about bringing newer features to older versions of Android, though. The Extension SDK may also be used to update Privacy Sandbox on newer versions of Android without having to roll out major OS updates. According to Google’s own description of the feature, Privacy Sandbox on Android “aims to develop new technologies that improve user privacy and enable effective, personalized advertising experiences for mobile apps.” Since the Extension SDK is aimed at developers looking to implement certain features in their apps, its workings are obviously complicated. In the broader sense, Google’s been trying to modularise components of Android since Android 10, helping the company make new functionality backwards compatible on already-released Android versions.

Twitter redesigns homepage for iOS app

Recently, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will soon make some changes to its user interface. And it looks like the microblogging platform has started rolling out a redesigned homepage interface.

As it turns out, the redesigned user interface is only available on the iOS version of the Twitter app. The updated interface replaces the ‘Home’ and ‘Latest’ tabs with ‘For You’ and ‘Following’ tabs and lets users easily switch between the two. For convenience, the two new tabs are pinned on top of the timeline. Earlier, users had to tap on the star-like icon that appeared on the top of the timeline and choose between ‘For You’ and ‘Latest’ tweets.

For the uninitiated, the ‘For You’ section displayed tweets you might be interested in while the ‘Latest’ section showed the latest tweets from accounts you follow. Also, Twitter is yet to confirm if the changes will make their way to the Android version of the app, so we will have to wait and see.