Android 14 will bring new features to smartphones near you in early 2023.

For the upcoming smartphones, the new Android version will bring some more exciting features on the table. Borrowing the biggest visual redesign from Android 12 and design philosphy from Android Lollipop. Moving to Android 14, we are going to see even more under-the-hood changes.

The first developer preview of Upside Down Cake released on 08 Feburary, 2023. Google’s continues to work towards the improvement of overall productivity as developers, and strengthening the performance, privacy, security, and user customization. Like with the previous Android iterations this release will add new aspects and minor improvements to different elements of the Android system.

Working across devices and form factors

Android 14 will follow up the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. To help developers build apps that adapt to different screen sizes. Google has created window size classes, sliding pane layout, Activity embedding and box with constraints and more. As with every new release, Google is trying to make it easier for the developers to optimize their apps across all Android surfaces.

Streamlining background work and Optimisation

Android 14 continues effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience. For app developers, you can expect to see Android 14 hit “platform stability” sometime around the third beta. Platform stability refers to the finalization of APIs, and last year, it coincided with the ability for developers to submit apps targeting the new API level on the Google Play Store.

Android will get a useful and beautiful new back gesture animation

Android 14 will offer a predictive back gestures, as Google shared in an Android Dev Summit panel. The system will offer new animations showing which screen you will navigate to next when you use the back gesture. This will work within apps and when your next move takes you to the home screen.

Who will get Android 14?

Owners of a recent Google Pixel smartphone release, like the new Pixel 7 series, you will be one of the first in line to get a taste of Android 14 when Google releases a stable version. But keep in mind that it will still only be in developer preview form and thus, you probably shouldn’t be using it as your daily driver but you’ll still be able to try it out to test new features.

We also expect other device manufacturers to join in on the fun, though it tends to be the case that devices from places like OnePlus and Xiaomi aren’t updated as regularly. Samsung users as always are going to enjoy much more than any other smatphones users out there as it is the only manufacturer that has been on par with Google’s own software update policies. Samsung has even outperformed Google in the smartphone update game.

Customization

Google is continuing to make sure that Android users can tune their experience around their individual needs, including enhanced accessibility and internationalization features. For example the new Android brings in bigger fonts with non-linear scaling. Starting in Android 14, users will be able to scale up their font to 200%. Previously, the maximum font size scale on Pixel devices was 130%. To mitigate issues where text gets too large, starting in Android 14, a non-linear font scaling curve is automatically applied. This ensures that text that is already large enough doesn’t increase at the same rate as smaller text.

For users pirvacy Google is bringing more onto the table

Google is restricting sideloading with Android 14. By default, you won’t be able to install apps that target an SDK version lower than 23, introduced 2015 with Android 6. Google explains that malware often uses SDK versions targeting older versions of Android to avoid restrictions part of SDK version 23 and higher. This will effectively make it much harder to get malware on devices, even when bad actors manage to convince users to sideload an app rather than getting it from the Play Store.

What do you think of the new Android 14? Comments below.

You may contact us through any of our contact channels for more information.