Android 14 is the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, and it brings a lot of new features and improvements to enhance your smartphone experience. Here are some of the highlights of Android 14 that you should know.
Accessibility
- Android 14 supports font scaling up to 200%, providing low-vision users with more options to adjust the text size on their devices. The system also uses non-linear font scaling to avoid making text that’s already large too big.
- Android 14 enables you to turn on camera flashes and screen flashes for incoming notifications. This can help users with hearing impairments or those who prefer visual cues. You can choose the color of the screen flash and whether to use one or both flashes.
Core functionality
- Android 14 requires apps to specify at least one foreground service type for each foreground service they use. This helps users understand what the app is doing and why it needs to run in the background.
- Android 14 includes features and improvements that align with the OpenJDK 17 LTS release, such as library updates and Java 17 language support for app and platform developers. Some of these updates may affect app compatibility, such as changes to regular expressions and UUID handling.
- Android 14 allows apps to kill only their own background processes when they call
kill Background Processes(). This prevents apps from interfering with other apps’ functionality or performance.
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Graphics
- Android 14 introduces new APIs for working with paths, which are graphical objects that represent shapes or curves. You can query paths to find out what’s inside of them, interpolate between paths whose structures match exactly, and enable morphing effects.
Internationalization
- Android 14 expands on the per-app language features that were introduced in Android 13 with some additional capabilities. You can now set your preferred language for each app separately, and the system will notify apps when you change your regional preferences.
- Android 14 provides a new Grammatical Inflection API that allows apps to more easily support languages that have grammatical gender, such as Spanish, French, and German. This can provide a more personalized and natural-sounding user experience for those languages.
- Android 14 respects your regional preferences for things like date and time formats, currency symbols, measurement units, and number separators. You can customize these preferences in the Settings app.
Media
- Android 14 supports playing lossless audio on USB headphones without missing calls. You can enjoy high-quality music without compromising on phone functionality.
- Android 14 lets you control your media playback from the lock screen with a new media widget. You can pause, play, skip, or rewind your music or podcasts without unlocking your phone.
Privacy
- Android 14 introduces a new permission called
SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM, which is required for apps that want to schedule alarms that fire at exact times. This permission is denied by default for most newly-installed apps targeting Android 13 and higher, and users can revoke it at any time in the Settings app. This helps users control how often apps can wake up their devices and potentially drain their battery. - Android 14 improves how context-registered broadcasts are delivered to apps that are in the cached state. The system may place these broadcasts in a queue until the app becomes active again, reducing unnecessary wake-ups and battery consumption.
Release date
According to Wikipedia, Google announced Android 14 on February 8, 2023, with the first Developer Preview releasing on the same day. However, the final Android 14 release date is not confirmed yet. Google notes that Android 14 is expected to reach the platform stability milestone in June and that developers will have “several weeks” from this point to test their apps before the stable release.
Based on previous versions, Android 14 may be released in Q3 or early Q4 of 2023
