Google shipped the fourth and final beta of Android 13 on July 13, 2022, and the framing mattered more than the feature list. Beta 4 was not a feature drop. It was a release candidate, the build Google handed developers so they could run their last compatibility checks before the stable version reached Pixel phones and the Android Open Source Project.
That distinction gets flattened in a lot of coverage, which tends to describe every beta as a performance and security upgrade. Beta 4 was mostly about locking things down. The APIs had already stopped moving a month earlier.
Platform Stability arrived at Beta 3, not Beta 4
Android 13 hit the Platform Stability milestone at Beta 3 in June 2022. By the time Beta 4 shipped, Google's announcement on the Android Developers Blog described the release as containing the latest fixes and optimizations, with "all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces."
In practice that meant an app behaving correctly on Beta 4 would behave the same way on the stable build. Google's ask of developers was correspondingly narrow: finish compatibility testing, publish updates ahead of the public rollout, and pay particular attention to three behavior changes, namely the new notification permission, clipboard preview, and JobScheduler prefetch handling.
Google also flagged a dependency problem in the ecosystem. SDK, library, tooling and game engine vendors needed to ship their compatible updates first, because the app and game developers downstream of them were blocked until those arrived. It is a recurring bottleneck in every Android release cycle, and one reason the final beta lands roughly a month before stable rather than a week.
Build number, patch level, and supported hardware
Beta 4 rolled out as build TPB4.220624.005, carrying the July 2022 security patch level. It arrived over the air for devices enrolled in the Android Beta Program.
Eligible Pixel hardware spanned the Pixel 4 through Pixel 6 generations:
- Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL
- Pixel 4a and Pixel 4a (5G)
- Pixel 5 and Pixel 5a
- Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 6a
Beyond Google's own phones, Beta 4 was available on select partner devices, as Android GSI images, and in the Android Emulator. That last option was how most developers actually did their testing, since it did not require dedicating a physical handset to a pre-release OS.
The privacy changes were the substantive part
If Beta 4 had a security story, it was the set of behavior changes developers had to accommodate for apps targeting API level 33. Google's behavior changes documentation lays these out, and they are more consequential than anything in the release notes.
Notifications became opt-in
Android 13 introduced POST_NOTIFICATIONS, a runtime permission for sending non-exempt notifications. Apps could no longer assume they had a channel to the user by default; they had to ask, the same way iOS has required for years. Google also documented a knock-on effect: if a user denies the permission, they stop seeing foreground service notices in the notification drawer, though those notices remain visible in the Task Manager either way.
Storage and Wi-Fi permissions got narrower
Blanket READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE access was replaced with granular media permissions: READ_MEDIA_IMAGES, READ_MEDIA_VIDEO and READ_MEDIA_AUDIO. Existing grants were automatically upgraded, and requesting images and video together still produced a single system dialog. Apps that only needed to let a user pick a photo could skip the permissions entirely by using the new system photo picker.
Separately, NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES gave apps a way to discover and connect to nearby access points, printers and casting targets without requesting ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION. Developers were told to set android:usesPermissionFlags to neverForLocation, which lets the system enforce that the permission is not being used as a backdoor to location data. Background access to body sensor data also moved behind a new hard-restricted BODY_SENSORS_BACKGROUND permission, and apps wanting the advertising ID had to declare AD_ID or receive a string of zeroes instead.
Connectivity APIs tightened too. BluetoothAdapter#enable() and disable() were deprecated and made to always return false, with carve-outs only for Device Owner, Profile Owner and system apps.
Beta 4.1 swept up the last bugs
Google issued one more patch before stable. Android 13 Beta 4.1, build TPB4.220624.008, arrived on July 25, 2022 and bumped Google Play services from 22.18.21 to 22.21.16. Its fixes were unglamorous and mostly about connectivity:
- Apps could no longer be blocked from toggling Bluetooth without BLUETOOTH_CONNECT when targeting an API level that did not require it
- Crashes and reboots when joining certain Wi-Fi networks
- Google Meet connections dropping while driving
- The system misinterpreting GPS data
Where it landed, and a chip correction worth making
Android 13 reached stable on August 15, 2022, going out to eligible Pixel phones and to AOSP the same day. The Pixel 4, 4 XL, 4a, 4a (5G), 5, 5a, 6, 6 Pro and 6a all received images.
The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, announced October 6, 2022, were the first phones to ship with Android 13 preinstalled. Both run Google's own Tensor G2, not a Qualcomm Snapdragon, a detail misreported often enough to be worth stating plainly. Tensor G2 is a 4nm part with a 2+2+4 CPU arrangement (two Cortex-X1, two Cortex-A76, four Cortex-A55), a Mali-G710 GPU, and Google's Titan M2 security coprocessor alongside its TPU. Every Pixel flagship since the Pixel 6 has used Google's own Tensor silicon rather than Qualcomm's.
What "performance boost" did and did not mean
Worth being blunt here: Google published no benchmark figures, frame-rate numbers or battery-life claims for Beta 4. The blog post describes fixes and optimizations without quantifying them, and no independent testing established a measurable speed delta between Beta 3 and Beta 4. Anyone citing a specific percentage improvement for this build is inventing it.
The real value of Beta 4 was predictability. Developers got a frozen API surface, a release-candidate build, and roughly a month to confirm their apps survived the permission changes before those changes reached hundreds of millions of devices. That is a less exciting story than a performance leap, and a considerably more accurate one.