Android 15 is preparing to popularize Ultra HDR

One of the best features introduced in last year’s Android 14 update is Ultra HDR. It’s an image format created by Google that’s built on top of the nearly ubiquitous JPEG format. An Ultra HDR image is essentially just a JPEG file with HDR metadata embedded in it, so devices with HDR displays can see an HDR version of the image, while devices without HDR displays can only see the SDR version. The format solves the conundrum of displaying high-quality images on both modern and older devices, but the catch is that only a handful of the best Android phones shoot in Ultra HDR. That could change soon, though.

With the release of Android 15 last week, Google released the latest version of the Android Compatibility Definition Document, or CDD for short. The CDD lists requirements that “device implementations” (i.e., the hardware and software on a device) must meet in order to be considered “Android compatible.” Google created the document to ensure that OEMs are creating devices that ship with Android builds that don’t deviate too much from each other in terms of system behavior and API availability. OEMs can of course ignore the CDD and simply modify AOSP as they see fit, but if they want access to Google Mobile Services (GMS), they have to play ball.

Android 15 CDD includes some new provisions for the Performance Class, a standard first introduced with the release of Android 12 in 2021. The Performance Class defines a set of hardware and software capabilities of a device that go beyond the basic Android requirements specified in the CDD. The purpose of the Performance Class is to quickly provide app developers with a way to determine when a given device is capable of performing certain high-performance tasks, such as HDR video codec support, hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding, and more.

Each version of Android has its own corresponding performance class, so there is a performance class for Android 12, Android 13, and Android 14. OEMs declare the specific performance class that their devices meet by setting a system property that applications read from. For example, devices that boot with Android 12 and meet the performance class 12 requirements can declare that they support performance class 12. When those same devices are updated to Android 13, their OEMs can continue to declare that those devices support performance class 12, or declare that they support performance class 13 if those devices meet the new requirements.

While Google hasn’t yet updated its developer docs to list everything that will constitute Performance Class 15, the Android 15 CDD does mention the new requirements. There are a lot of minor changes in Performance Class 15, but the most significant ones are listed in the following two points:

• (7.5/H-1-18) MUST support JPEG_R for main rear camera and main front camera.
  …
• (7.5/H-1-20) By default, the main camera app must be set to JPEG_R format for the main rear and main front cameras.

The “JPEG_R” you see there is the actual name of the Ultra HDR image format. The R stands for Recovery Map, which refers to the HDR gain map embedded in the JPEG file. Performance Class 15 requires devices to not only support Ultra HDR for the main rear and front cameras, but also output Ultra HDR images by default when capturing images from the main rear and front cameras using the camera app. This is notable because it’s the first time we’ve seen Google require devices to support the new Ultra HDR image format.

However, since this requirement only applies to devices that claim a performance class of 15, many devices that launch with or are updated to Android 15 will not be required to support Ultra HDR. This requirement will only apply to high-end Android 15 devices that opt ​​for the performance class standard. Fortunately, however, we are seeing more and more OEMs adopting Ultra HDR without having to, which is great, since previously each OEM used its own proprietary HDR format. As Ultra HDR support becomes more popular, we hope to see some third-party camera apps roll out updates to enable Ultra HDR capture.