Android 16 Rolls Out In June, But Don’t Expect The New Look Yet

Google has now confirmed that the stable version of Android 16 will start to rollout in June. We exclusively reported, back in November of last year that Android 16 would launch on June 3. That still looks to be accurate.

Google also confirmed that Material 3 Expressive would not be part of the public release in June. Which is what we expected, since the new design was not available in the betas for Android 16, which is now pretty much complete. We do expect Material 3 Expressive to start showing up in the QPR1 beta, which should be starting next month.

The launch date for Android 16 is pretty wild, considering Samsung has just started to roll out Android 15 to its devices last month.

Of course, that June date is only for Pixel devices. While other OEMs could start rolling out Android 16 in June as well, that is unlikely. As they need to bake their skin and features into the new Android 16 update.

This is an earlier launch than usual

As we started to see last year, Google is changing up its schedule for Android and Pixel. We saw that the Pixel 9 launched earlier last year. It’s coming in August instead of the usual October launch. And then the first developer previews for Android 16 also started a solid 3-4 months early.

So why is Google changing the timing of its launches? Well, for Android, this is likely so that the fall phones launch with the latest version of Android. Since there are a lot of phones that launch in July, August, and September. When it comes to Pixel, this is likely so that it’s not so close to the holidays and gets forgotten.

Android 17 will likely start its developer preview around November, if Google decides to keep this same schedule going forward.