Google has released the first public beta of Android 14. In a blog post on Wednesday, the tech giant announced that the first public beta is now available to be downloaded by users, as long as they have a compatible phone. The beta brings numerous revamps, tweaks, improvements to privacy and security, and more.
“Today we’re releasing the first Beta of Android 14, building around our core themes of privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to improve the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more. We’ve been making steady progress refining the features and stability of Android 14, and it’s time to open the experience up to both developers and early adopters,” Google said in the blog post.
The list of compatible devices goes back to the Pixel 4a 5G, according to the blog post. The devices are the Pixel 7 Pro, the Pixel 7, the Pixel 6A, the Pixel 6 Pro, the Pixel 6, the Pixel 5A, the Pixel 5, and the Pixel 4A 5G. Google remained mum on the support for non-Google smartphones but informed that it will add more devices to the list as they became supported.
“We’ve been making steady progress refining the features and stability of Android 14, and it’s time to open the experience up to both developers and early adopters,” Dave Burke, Google’s VP of Engineering, wrote in the official blog post. Google also displayed its roadmap for the coming months, wherein it revealed that the public beta will continue to be available during April and May. The company will release a platform stability build in June, while the final stable rollout could start around August or September. However, it should be noted that some of the new features that are in development might not end up in the final version of Android 14.
The first beta is more stable than the first Android 14 developer preview that dropped a few months ago and introduces a smarter system UI and a new “back arrow” feature. The latter is aimed to provide a smoother navigation experience while interacting with the app in order “to help improve back gesture understanding and usefulness. The back arrow also compliments the user’s wallpaper or device theme.”
Next comes a superior system share sheet, wherein apps can add custom actions to the system share sheet they trigger. Additionally, the system now uses more app signals to determine the ranking of the direct share targets. The beta also brings better graphics features, as well as giving users the ability to query paths to “find out what’s inside of them.” The enhancement of per-app language preferences also enables dynamic customizations of the languages displayed in the Android settings per-app language list. Users can, with Android 14, configure their apps to support per-app language preferences automatically.
The new data-sensitive API for developers will now allow apps to limit the visibility of specified views only to accessibility services to help users with disabilities.
