With each release, specific Android APIs might become obsolete or need to be refactored to provide a better developer experience or support new platform capabilities. In these cases, we officially deprecate the obsolete APIs and direct developers to alternative APIs to use instead.
Deprecation means that we've ended official support for the APIs, but they will continue to remain available to developers. This page highlights some of the notable deprecations in this release of Android. To see other deprecations, refer to the API diff report.
Use Spatializer instead of Virtualizer
First added in Android 12 (API level 32), the Spatializer
class lets apps query the capabilities and behavior of sound spatialization on
the device. In Android 15, we're deprecating the
Virtualizer class. Use
AudioAttributes.Builder.setSpatializationBehavior instead
to characterize how you want your content to be played when spatialization is
supported.
AndroidX media3 ExoPlayer 1.0 enables spatial audio by default for multichannel audio when the device supports it. See this recent blog post and the spatial audio documentation for more information, including APIs to control the feature.