Android 17 Beta 2: pickers and local network

Beta 2 arrived on 26 February 2026, thirteen days after Beta 1. It brought most of the system pickers that Android 17 uses in place of broad permissions, and the two privacy changes that reach apps through the network and the SMS inbox.

New APIs in Beta 2

• App bubbles. Users can turn any app into a floating bubble by long-pressing its launcher icon; large screens get a bubble bar in the taskbar. Google’s post adds that bubbles “aren’t yet fully enabled in Beta 2”.
• EyeDropper. Intent.ACTION_OPEN_EYE_DROPPER returns the colour of any pixel on the display without a screen capture permission.
• Contacts Picker. ACTION_PICK_CONTACTS grants temporary access to only the fields the user picks, from the personal or the work profile, without READ_CONTACTS.
• Touchpad pointer capture. A captured touchpad now reports relative, mouse-like movement; View.POINTER_CAPTURE_MODE_ABSOLUTE keeps the raw finger positions.
• Cross-device handoff. The Handoff API resumes an app’s state on a nearby device, such as a tablet, through CompanionDeviceManager, with a web fallback.
• Ranging and data plans. UWB DL-TDOA (FiRa 4.0) for indoor navigation, Wi-Fi Alliance proximity detection, and getStreamingAppMaxDownlinkKbps() / getStreamingAppMaxUplinkKbps() for carrier-allocated streaming rates.
• Time and text. ACTION_TIMEZONE_OFFSET_CHANGED fires on offset changes such as daylight saving time, and ICU 78 brings Unicode 17.

Behaviour changes in Beta 2

• Local network. Apps targeting API 37 lose LAN access unless they use a system device picker or hold the new ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK runtime permission. It belongs to the NEARBY_DEVICES group, so users who already granted a nearby devices permission are not asked again.
• OTP messages held for three hours. WebOTP messages are held from every app that is not the verified recipient, whatever it targets. For apps targeting 37, the hold covers every SMS with an OTP. The default SMS app, the assistant and connected companion apps are exempt; Google points everyone else to SMS Retriever or SMS User Consent.
• NPU access. Apps targeting 37 that use the neural processing unit directly, including through the LiteRT NPU delegate or the deprecated NNAPI, must declare FEATURE_NEURAL_PROCESSING_UNIT or they are blocked.

The release notes list 16 fixed issues. The first is an Android 16 regression that made active apps restart or refresh on their own.