- Android 16 is introducing a new WritingTools API.
- The WritingTools API lets apps opt out of writing tools that enable keyboards to replace the user’s text with text generated by AI.
- Apps might want to disable AI writing tools when the user is inputting text in certain text fields like for emails.
Google rolled out the second developer preview of Android 16 the other day, bringing the platform a whole host of new developer features like better app control over haptics, search support for cloud media items in the photo picker, an adaptive refresh rate API, and more. As usual, it also includes changes that Google didn’t highlight in its announcement, some of which we’ve already covered. The latest change we’ve spotted is a new Writing Tools API that seemingly lets apps opt out of having AI rewrite text for you.
While digging through the documentation for Android 16 DP2, we notice that Google documented two new methods in the EditorInfo class: isWritingToolsEnabled() and setWritingToolsEnabled(). The EditorInfo class basically lets apps communicate information about an editable text field (like the type of text content it contains) to the current input method (i.e. an Android keyboard app).