Android 14 Developer Preview 2 released

The release of beta versions of Android has already become a familiar annual ritual. A month ago, the company launched the first developer preview of Android 14 , and now the second one . As with the first release, this version is still for developers, with more public and easy-to-install betas planned for April. So far, most of the features that Google has talked about have also been focused on developers. This also applies to the second pre-release, which mainly focuses on new security and privacy features.

Perhaps the most important new privacy feature to mention – and one that will be facing the user – is that Android’s new photo picker will now ask users if they want to give the app temporary access to individual photos instead of to always allow access to all media on this device. Google is asking developers to test this new behavior in their apps to make sure they can handle this new stream of permissions and choices.

Android 14 will also have a new API for detecting screenshots “to prevent unnecessary access to user data.”

Android 14 also adds Credential Manager , a credential manager as a platform API – and via the Jetpack library with the Google Play Services implementation, it will support this until Android 4.4 (which was a 2013 KitKat release). It will support passwords and passkey. And while it was already available in the first preview, Google notes that they have now improved the user interface and made some changes to the API.

With this release, Google is also introducing new optimizations to Android’s memory management system that will now more quickly disable background processes from apps that have entered a cached state.

On the user side, Google will now make it easier for users to more granularly personalize some Android settings, such as temperature units, the first day of the week, and number systems. “A European living in the United States may prefer temperature units to be in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit, and have apps treat Monday as the start of the week rather than the US default Sunday,” Google explains.

As Google notes, now is a good time for developers to start compatibility testing to prepare for the release of Android 14 later this year. System builds are available for the Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, and Pixel 4a (5G), and of course there’s an Android emulator image.