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One of the most underrated features of every smartphone is the ability to use your phone camera’s flash as an actual flashlight. For the most part, it’s available as a Quick Settings toggle and can be accessed without even needing to set anything up. But there is one feature that has been found on other devices that Pixel owners have been missing out on, and that’s the ability to adjust the intensity of the flashlight brightness.
Thanks to the Esper Blog, it seems that Google is planning to change things up with Android 13. The first Developer Preview has been available for a couple of weeks, and Mishaal Rahman of Esper discovered a series of APIs that will allow apps to control the brightness. This means that you’ll finally be able to adjust the brightness of your flashlight, which can really come in handy if you’re trying to avoid waking up your partner when searching for some socks in the dark.
Currently, if you are running Android 13 DP 1, then you won’t find any of these changes to be implemented. That’s because while the APIs are present, they have to be implemented by an app developer. Additionally, Google has yet to implement support for Google’s hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for older Pixel devices.
The folks over at 9to5Google were able to show off how the feature would work with an app that adjusts the flash brightness so we can see how it could be implemented:
Considering that this functionality has been available on different Android phones for years, it’s a bit interesting to see Google implement the changes. Nevertheless, quality of life improvements are always welcome, even if they end up only being limited to the latest Pixel devices for the time being. Here’s to hoping that focuses more on these little improvements with Android 13, after bringing so many drastic changes last year.
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