Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 14 – Everything you need to know”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Joe Handy from Android authority and it’s that time of year again, Android 14 code named upside down cake is now out with its first developer preview and it’s time for us to talk about it in terms of design. Most of the stuff is where we left them in Android 13., the home, screen’s, quick settings and regular settings are about the same, and we didn’t really expect any large changes going into Android 14.. Most of the big design changes are usually left to later developer, previews and betas anyway. So we’ll keep an eye out, but there were some things that we wanted to see. Android 13 introduced the notion of predictive back gestures and Android 14 has an advanced version. Basically, as you use the back gesture, the OS will show you what screen you’re headed to next. You need a developer flag to use it within applications, but taking the predictive back gesture setting in the developer options. Lets you see what it looks like with the settings menu going back to the home screen? At the very least, the battery usage section got a bit of a refresh as well screen time since last charge is now plainly visible and the app and system usages are now separated. The battery saver UI has also gotten changed with a basic and Extreme battery saver. You can also find the Adaptive battery toggle in this area. You can use the schedule and reminder option to schedule battery saver times at your leisure.
Some other minor changes include the return of the fast pair setting and the connected devices portion of the settings menu. The Eid is now displayed directly in the about phone section instead of the Sim settings section and finally, the turn screen on option in the special access section of the app settings only shows apps that use the turn screen on permission instead of every application. That has the Wake lock permission, we’re sure there are some other minor changes floating around, but those are the big ones. Android releases these days are a bit light on features, but there are still some interesting things rummaging around for starters, Android 14 appears to have an app cloning feature. Oems, like Samsung, have done this for years and it basically lets you run multiple instances of an application for the purposes of using multiple accounts.
It’S not visible in the developer preview at this time, so hopefully we’ll see it in a future release. Google has also introduced slightly different font scaling. It now lets you scale text up to 200 percent, whereas the previous maximum was 130 percent. When the text gets a little crowded, Android uses non-linear scaling to fit everything by not letting the larger text scale up as quickly as the smaller text you can fiddle around with this in the accessibility settings. Another neat feature is the inclusion of Health Connect.
It’S baked right into the operating system. Now, so you don’t have to download the app from Google Play anymore. You can find it in the settings menu. I just searched for it myself.
Once you set it up, you can use it to share health and fitness data between apps on your device. I didn’t mess around with it too much, but it’s there if you want to – and it’s inclusion in Android should help more developers included in their fitness apps and that’s about it for Android features. For now, we’re sure we’re going to hear more in the coming days and weeks so stay tuned for more info as per the norm. Most of the changes are taking place under the hood in the form of new apis API changes and performance updates.
The list is quite numerous, so we’ll try to summarize them briefly. One of the big focuses of Android 14 is continuing the work from Android 13 when it comes to devices with larger screens. That includes changes to apis that control things like window size, sliding pane, layout activity, embedding and even boxes. Google is allowing developers to preview the new cross device SDK, which should help even further. These changes are mostly for developers, so there’s nothing to really look at yet, but these changes help developers optimize their apps better for varying screen sizes, the app continuity between multiple Android devices, and that is all a major theme in this year’s release.
Google is also touting app compatibility in this release with over 300 open jdk classes, but they are also opt-in, so apps don’t break if developers don’t get to updating their apps fast enough. Google is also giving developers easier access to debugging, which should translate to better apps over time. Android 14 also includes support for satellite connectivity, similar to the latest versions of iOS.
Of course, your device has to have the hardware to make this work, but Qualcomm includes this functionality on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so at least some devices in 2023 will have it in addition to that, Google hasn’t included updates to General performance, including downloading large files. Over Wi-Fi, optimizing broadcasts, Sony, PlayStation, dual sense, Edge controller support per app language support improvements, NTFS support, av-1 video Codec support, new project Mainline modules and even changed how alarms work we’ll link to the Android developers website? So you can read more up on all of those things if you want to, but the list is quite lengthy, so prepare yourself, Google included some new security and privacy stuff in Android 14. Some of it is General API stuff, so you’ll get the benefits eventually, when app developers include the new stuff, but there are some user-facing things as well. Once such user-facing thing is the inability to sideload some applications, Google says it won’t allow side loading or installing of any app that targets Android, SDK, 22 or lower for the record.
Those are apps that Target Android 5.1, which was from like a million years ago, apps that Target Android, SDK, 23 and higher will still work. This appears to be active for only some folks, though I tried side loading, a version of Evernote that targets Android 1.6 donut and it installed fine. But I did get a warning when opening it. For the first time, installing ancient apps from Google Play also still works, but you do get a warning. The actual block is likely coming with a later Android 14 release, most apps, even once people side load Target higher versions of Android, so it’s not the biggest deal, but we understand that some people may not like this particular change.
On the plus side, Google seems to be taking steps to prevent applications from seeing your entire camera roll. Basically, the OS inserts a photo picker in as a middleman, even if the application doesn’t ask for it. This isn’t available on the Android 14 developer preview, but you can see what it’ll look like from this screenshot attribution given in the bottom left, given that the photo picker is also likely to become a project Mainline module, it’s nice to see one of Android’s clunkiest functions, Get some love, and now it is time to say the boilerplate things that I always have to say, because I always have to say them. No, don’t install this, it’s a developer preview and it does not work well for daily use, except it actually worked. Okay.
For me, although I’ve only had it for one afternoon, these new developer previews feel a lot better than they used to back in the old days, but I still don’t recommend it. Developer previews are for developers and not for us normal people. That said, Android 14 feels a little bit different from the last couple of releases. Gone. Are the references to material? U and the change log here feels like Google is finishing up old projects before starting on something new. For instance, the predictive back gesture was actually present in a limited capacity in Android 13, so it’s not even technically new.
It’S just getting improved. The same goes for the tech scaling and even the design elements feel like administrative paper shuffling, rather than anything substantively new. Now long time, viewers know that I’m okay with this, it makes my job easier, but it is hard to build hype for releases like this. There are plenty of other developer, previews and betas.
Coming, though, and it’s not unlike Google, to save some cooler stuff for the more user, 4 releases like the first beta on the screen. Currently, you should see the Android 14 release schedule. We have another developer preview coming next month with beta releases starting in April and a final release sometime after July. That means we have four more releases before the final release and go.
Google could introduce plenty of new stuff in that time before we head out. We’Ll show you the Easter egg situation, it’s still the one from Android 13 for the time being, and these usually don’t get sorted until they later build anyway, a hand that about does it for this one. Folks, as usual, we have some written articles with more details. In the video description, if you want to check them out and stay tuned as we’ll be covering Android 14 through its official launch later this year as usual, thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day, .