Still waiting for your phone to get updated to Android 13? Google is here to enhance your FOMO by unveiling its timeline of when it expects Android 14 to officially launch and announcing the first Developer Preview build is already available to download. The good news is that there are around 6 months until Android 14's official release. The bad news? It's likely that your phone maker will still suck at rolling out an update to your phone, unless it's made by Google, Samsung, or OnePlus.
Anyhow, according to Google's timeline graphic, we can expect Android 14's Pixel beta program to begin sometime during April and continue through til June which sees the final few stability builds being rolled out. Google isn't specifically saying when the public release of Android 14 will be announced but it's usually towards the end of August or in early September, so long as everything goes as planned.
The Android 14 Developer Build is available for the following Pixel handsets:
- Pixel 4a (5G)
- Pixel 5 and 5a
- Pixel 6 and 6 Pro
- Pixel 6a
- Pixel 7 and 7 Pro
What can we expect from the first Android 14 Developer Preview?
According to the Android Developers post, we can expect Android 14 to feature the following new or improved functions:
- Building on the work done in Android 12L and Android 13 to support the foldable and large-screen form factors with the aim of improving app quality.
- Streamlining background processes to optimize app usage, improve system and battery health, and enhance the user experience
- Changes to Android APIs to add new functionality to downloading large files when WiFi is available.
- Optimizations to the internal broadcast system to improve battery life and enhance responsiveness.
- Non-clock and calendar apps will need to ask for user permission to access the Schedule Exact Alarm special permission before the app can be used.
- Further enhancements to customization options, including improved accessibility and internationalization features
- Users will be able to scale up their font to 200%, 70% more than previously possible. In case text gets too big, Android 14 includes a non-linear font scaling curve which ensures that text that is already large enough doesn't increase at the same rate as the smaller text.
- Per-app language preferences can be dynamically customized by app developers
- A Grammatical Inflection API has been added to help developers add support for users that speak languages that have grammatical gender.
- More Privacy and Security enhancements which includes blocking the installation of apps with a targetSDKVersion of 22 and lower.
