We're still digging through changes in Android 12's brand-new Beta 1 release, but we've already spotted a minor tweak to a change that has been teased a few times in prior previews. Beta 1 has a new, slightly sparkly ripple animation when you tap on stuff.

It's a bit subtle to pick up in the GIF below (and almost looks like compression noise), but we also have a close-up recording of the sparkles when the animation has expanded to its full width:

Sparkles — above in several spots across Settings, and below in close-up.

[video width="998" height="456" mp4="https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/18/screen-20210518-200959_3.mp4"]

The new animation sprinkles an ever-changing splatter of sparkles that appear along the inside leading edge of the expanding dark circle, and if you hold your finger down to keep selection on that element, they continue to sparkle and dance slightly along the outermost edges of the area the animation expanded to.

An artist's depiction of Android 12's new sparkle.

Previously, a slightly different ripple effect was spotted in development. It was textured as well, and though Twitter compression is a pain to deal with in the example below, it looks far noiser:

During I/O, the sparkle effect was introduced by Romain Guy from the Android Toolkit team. You can see it in action in the video below (queued at 15:40):

For more Android 12 coverage in light of the new Beta release, keep an eye on our Android 12 feature series.