We have been tracking the development and release of Android 14 since its first developer preview. Today, the second Developer Preview of Android 14 gets released, building on the work of the first developer preview of Android 14 from last month with additional enhancements to privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to refine the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more.

Android 14 – Upside Down Cake (unofficially named as Google has now moved away from naming Android based on confectionaries) is the next major release of Android. Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round and the reviews and feedback shared as part of the developer previews and Quarterly Platform Relase (QPR) Beta Programs get deliberated upon and integrated into the upcoming releases.

Support for all form factors

The biggest part of Android 14 is going to remain support for tablets and foldable form factors. With smartphone manufacturers going all in to see foldables as the next novel offering in the market, Android having built in support for the same only makes most sense.

Privacy and security

Privacy and security have always been a core part of Android’s mission. The new features included as part of Android 14 are Selected photos access, Credential manager and Safer implicit intents

Improved App Store Experiences

Android 14 introduces several new PackageInstaller APIs which allow app stores to improve their user experience, including the requestUserPreapproval() method that allows the download of APKs to be deferred until after the installation has been approved, the setRequestUpdateOwnership() method that allows an installer to indicate that it is responsible for future updates to an app it is installing, and the setDontKillApp() method that can seamlessly install optional features of an app through split APKs while the app is in use.

Personalization

Regional preferences enable users to personalize temperature units, the first day of the week, and numbering systems. A European living in the United States might prefer temperature units to be in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and for apps to treat Monday as the beginning of the week instead of the US default of Sunday.

App compatibility

As with every major OS release, there would be some new features while there would also be some features/APIs that get deprecated. In Android 14 you now have a choice to opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes.

The final developer preview or the most stable release for developers would now be expected sometime in June 2023.

Google is raising the quality bar on Android apps, with sharing insights and notices to both, the developers as well as users. Quality of an app is as important to the end user as it should be to the developer, as that is what will get in the performance as well as good reviews.

One of the most important ways to boost your app quality and attract more users is to focus on technical quality. For this, the developers would need to follow a certain set of guidelines as well as receive insights from Play Store, in order to keep track of the usage and keep improving the app based on the metrics and feedback.

The starting point for maintaing the technical quality of the app should always be Android’s Core App Quality Checklist. Make your app experience as compelling, smooth, and safe as possible. Work through the tests on this page to assess your app’s visual experience, performance, security, and more.

The next pit stop in the journey to improve your app quality would be to keep monitoring Android Vitals in your Play Console.

Android Vitals reports on key user-impacting issues and helps you to debug and prioritize across them. It gives you a comprehensive understanding of your stability on Android with visibility of user-perceived crashes and ANRs (Application Not Responding errors), includes stack traces, event tags, and device information to help you understand and resolve problems as well as set up alerts so you can respond to new and emerging issues as quickly as possible.

To improve quality across the board, Google enforces an overall bad behavior threshold. The threshold is 1.09% for user-perceived crash rate, and 0.47% for user-perceived ANR rate. To maximize your app’s visibility on Google Play, it’s important to stay below these thresholds. If your title exceeds the device bad behavior threshold on any core vital for a given phone model, then Google Play may reduce the visibility of your app for users on that phone model and start showing a warning to the users downloading the app, below the Install button.

Users expect great experiences on their devices, and developers who deliver on their expectations will achieve greater success on Google Play!

Google is launching its Developer Preview of the new Cross Device SDK for Android.

With this SDK, developers can now build applications for all Android devices, independent of the form factor.

Today Android is used across different platforms, in your smart phones, tablets, TVs, wearables and even cars. And while at it, people do want the devices to be connected to each other so the data on one can be accessed via the other device.

However, at the moment, an app created for one form factor not necessarily works on the other. So, if you want your app to work in all the form factors, you would need to end up building an app for each of them.

With the launch of this new Cross Device SDK for Android, the developers can take advantage of the SDK along with the new APIs that are part of it to be able to simplify the following use cases for the device owners…

• Discovering and authorizing communication with nearby devices.
• Sharing an app’s current state with the same app on another device.
• Starting the app on a secondary device without having to keep the app running in background.
• Establishing secure connections for devices to communicate with each other.
• Enabling task handoff where the user starts a task on one device, and can easily continue on another device.

Refer to the Cross Device SDK developer guide to get started and start offering an all round experience for your app users.

We have been tracking the new UI changes and features that will be arriving with Android 13 through our past 2 articles UI changes in Android 13 and New features in Android 13. Now, for the final one, let’s highlight what’s new in Android 13 for the developers.

Even if you are not a developer, it might be worth being aware of what new features you can expect in your favorite apps once the app developers begin to roll out their respective app updates integrating the new possibilities that will be available to them.

Apps can now turn ON the screen

Android has added a new permission “WAKE_LOCK”. Now if you want your app to be able to wakeup the screen during any event, you can ask for a user’s permission for the “WAKE_LOCK” permission to be activated for the app.

Camera improvements

New API for your camera, “Preview stabilization API” stabilizes the preview as well as all other non-RAW streams, in order to give a “what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)” effect.

Control the brightness of the Flash

The Android 13 release includes new methods in the CameraManager class that allows apps to get and set the flash light brightness level. Only devices that report a value greater than 1 when apps use CameraCharacteristics.FLASH_INFO_STRENGTH_MAXIMUM_LEVEL will support this feature.

Enterprises can now block users from adding WiFi networks

If a device is fully managed by an enterprise, using their managed devices policy, app developers can now add the new UserManager.DISALLOW_ADD_WIFI_CONFIG restriction to hide the “add network” option on your device.

FPS management

Android’s Gaming mode, now supports setting the FPS that a game should run at.

Finetuning media file permissions

Till now, when an app needed access to any media file from your device, it would simply ask for media access permission or storage permission. Now with Android 13, apps can specifically ask for the media type, whether they want access to images, videos or audio files, or maybe all.

Body sensor permissions only while app is in use

Apps could access body permissions like temperature, heart beat sensor, accelerometer sensor etc. Now with Android 13, a user can limit these permissions to be allowed to be used only when an application is in use and not in the background. This could be a great way to optimize the battery usage.

Forwarding calls to connected devices

Say you have an Android Phone as well as an Android Tablet, but at the moment you have the tablet in your hand while your phone is docked for charging. You will be able to connect the devices in such a way that calls on your phone could be attended to from your tablet. This feature was being provided on Samsung devices for a while, which now Google plans on integrating it with Android OS itself for a wider consumption.

Overall in our 3 part series of articles, we have tried to cover majority of the major, noticeable changes that would be arriving to your devices once it gets the push from the manufacturer. If you wish to look at all the changelong in full detail, feel free to look into the Android 13 changelog and release notes.