Google is offering Generic System Images of its Android 13 beta build, opening up the possibility for many non-Pixel devices as well as Pixels out of support to test the beta for themselves. You might be raring to get at it for your own phone, but you'll need to make sure it's eligible to get started.
Four experimental builds are available supporting either x86_64 or ARM64 architectures and the option to include or exclude Google Mobile Services apps. You can retrieve them from the Android Developers website and load them onto an Android 9 (API level 28) or later device that is fully Treble-compliant. Do note that you'll need an unlocked bootloader to load these images on, so be careful about that manufacturer's warranty.
Google says it's aware of three major issues:
- Phone Audio: When using the integrated dialer, you might not hear any audio on the phone. This is due to a change in the telephony service installation location in Android 10.
- Power Cycle: Rebooting GSI might fail on some devices. To work around it, reboot the device into recovery mode, erase user data, perform a factory reset, and then reboot the device.
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System partition size: GSI + GMS file size (images named
_gsi\_gms\_arm64-*_) might be bigger than the default dynamic system partition size on your device. To work around this issue, you can delete some non-essential dynamic partitions, such as the product partition, and flash the GSI again. For more information, see the flashing GSIs documentation.
These images are almost if not entirely identical to the ones designated for the Pixels currently supported with the company citing use of the same AOSP and GMS sources. Developers should note that this release is not Compatibility Test Suite approved, even though these images have been validated on Pixel 4 and later devices with similar CTS results to the dedicated images. Other OEMs including Samsung have offered GSIs featuring Android builds in development along with their UX attached. Google has offered GSIs since at least the Android 10 development cycle when Project Treble optimizations were beginning to become established.
If you're cheeky enough to give one of these GSIs a go, but don't know where to start, follow the guidance posted on the Android Developers site and check out our tutorial on how to manually load any image.