With each release, specific Android APIs might become obsolete or need to be refactored to provide a better developer experience or support new platform capabilities. In these cases, we officially deprecate the obsolete APIs and direct developers to alternative APIs to use instead.
Deprecation means that we've ended official support for the APIs, but they will continue to remain available to developers. This page highlights some of the notable deprecations in this release of Android. To see other deprecations, refer to the API diff report.
Use Spatializer instead of Virtualizer
First added in Android 12 (API level 32), the Spatializer
class lets apps query the capabilities and behavior of sound spatialization on
the device. In Android 15, the Virtualizer class is
deprecated. Use
AudioAttributes.Builder.setSpatializationBehavior instead
to characterize how you want your content to be played when spatialization is
supported.
AndroidX media3 ExoPlayer 1.0 enables spatial audio by default for multichannel audio when the device supports it. See this recent blog post and the spatial audio documentation for more information, including APIs to control the feature.
WebSQL deprecated in Android WebView
The setDatabaseEnabled and getDatabaseEnabled
methods from WebSettings are now deprecated. These settings activated support
for WebSQL inside Webview. WebSQL is now removed in Chrome and is now deprecated
on Android Webview. These methods will become a no-op on all Android versions in
the next 12 months.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) encourages apps needing web databases to adopt Web Storage API technologies like localStorage and sessionStorage, or IndexedDB. SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System outlines a replacement set of technologies based on the SQLite database, compiled to Web Assembly (Wasm), and backed by the origin private file system to enable more direct migration of WebSQL code.