For some time now, rumors have circulated about the new photo picker that will be included with Android 13. As far back as Android version 11, this feature’s code was present. While that is true, it appears that Google wants to make this capability available on even more vintage Android devices.

If you truly keep an eye on what your apps are permitted to view, this new photo picker is fantastic. Normally, you would need to give an app access to all of your files if it just needed access to one image or video on your smartphone. Some people find that to be uncomfortable. You don’t want the app to have access to all of your files just so you may upload a photo of your car.

This problem will be fixed by the new photo picker. By doing this, you’ll give the app access to just the image or video that you want to share. If you choose to share that particular image of your cat, the app will only have access to that one image.

Advertisement THE ANDROID 13 PHOTO PICKER COULD be added to many older Android versions. The Android deep-dive king himself, Mishaal Rahman , is the source of this information. We are aware of the photo picker activity in Google Play Services, which was created for API 30. Android 11 is referred to by API 30. Rahman, however, went back and reviewed earlier iterations of Google Play Services and discovered the photo picker in API 28. That is the Android 9 Pie API level.

That was the Android release that took place back in August 2018. This indicates that the new photo picker will work with devices running that outdated OS. With this, devices like the first Pixel phone, which could only run Android 10, will be covered.

This is only conjecture, since per Android Police , Google appears to have taken this information out of its patch notes. This could imply that Google backpedaled on making this choice. We’ll have to wait till later to find out if Google will use any new techniques on its older devices.