Google’s Android launch cadence for Android has turn out to be a well-recognized annual ritual. A month in the past, the corporate launched the primary developer preview of Android 14 and now, a month later, right here is the second developer preview. Like with the primary launch, that is very a lot a model that’s nonetheless meant for builders, with the extra public — and simpler to put in — betas scheduled to reach in April. To this point, most of the options Google has talked about have additionally been developer-centric, with only some user-facing options uncovered to far. That additionally holds true for this second preview, which largely focuses on added new security and privacy options.
Picture Credit: Google
Possibly a very powerful new privacy function value calling out right here — and one which will likely be user-facing — is that the new Android photograph picker will now ask customers in the event that they solely wish to give an app entry to pick photographs as an alternative of at all times having to permit entry to each photograph and video on a given system. Google is asking builders to check this new habits with their apps to make sure that they’ll deal with this new permission and choice circulate.
Android 14 may also function a new screenshot detection API “to stop pointless entry to a person’s knowledge.”
Android 14 can be including a credential supervisor as a platform API — and by way of a Jetpack Library with a Google Play Companies implementation, it’ll assist this again to Android 4.4 (that was the KitKat launch from 2013). It’ll assist passwords and passkeys. And whereas this was already accessible within the first preview, Google notes that it has now improved the person interface and made some API modifications, too.
With this launch, Google can be introducing new optimizations to Android’s reminiscence administration system, which is able to now extra shortly disallow background processes from apps which have gone right into a cached state.
On the user-facing facet, Google will now make it simpler for customers to extra granularly personalize some of Android settings like temperature items, first day of the week and numbering methods. ” A European dwelling in america would possibly favor temperature items to be in Celsius quite than Fahrenheit and for apps to deal with Monday as the start of the week as an alternative of the US default of Sunday,” Google explains, completely describing my very own private preferences as a European dwelling in america.
As Google notes, now’s the time for builders to begin their compatibility testing to prepare for the Android 14 launch later this 12 months. System images can be found for the Pixel 7 Professional, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Professional, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G), as properly, of course, photos for the Android Emulator.
Picture Credit: Google
