The Android team at Google LLC today released the first developer preview for Android 14, which provides more productivity updates for developers, improvements for device health systems and more options for user customization.

Previews provide much-needed preparation time and breathing room for application developers to see what’s coming down the pipeline and provide feedback about what should go into upcoming builds of the operating system. The Android team is seeking early feedback on new features that will help the team guide what should go into the final release.

Supporting multidevice experiences and large screens

Android 14 continues to iterate on the work done for large-screen devices by Android 12L, a user interface update for Android 12 that added features designed to make using tablets and foldable phones simpler and easier to use, which was enhanced in Android 13.

That means developers will now have access to a number of new UI features that allow apps to adapt to different screen sizes such as window size classes, sliding pane layouts and space constraints, allowing visuals to flow correctly according to what room is available for display.

To prepare developers for this update, the Android team updated the app quality guidance for large screens and there are now more tutorials about building for large screens and foldables on the developer portal as well. There’s also a large screen gallery for developers to draw inspiration for apps from, including designs for social media, productivity and shopping.

Developers can get started today with the cross-device software development kit preview that allows for building compatible apps quickly across different device screen sizes and form factors. It also provides everything needed for secure data connections and data transfers between devices and multi-device sessions, which allow for easy switching between devices using the same app.

“Multidevice experiences are a big part of the future of Android,” said Dave Burke, Android vice president of engineering. “Our goal is to make optimizing your app across everywhere Android runs easier with every release.”

Improving battery life with optimized background work

In order to improve battery life and system health, Android 14 optimizes the way that apps work together. By giving priority to foreground services and managing background services better, it will mean that batteries will last longer and users will see their devices as more responsive.

“It’s more complicated than necessary to perform some background work, such as downloading large files when WiFi is available,” said Burke. “We’re creating a standard path for this work to simplify your app development and potentially improve the user experience.”

To do this, Android 14 is making changes to its application programming interfaces around foreground services and its job scheduler surrounding user-initiated data transfers and a new requirement to declare foreground services. This means that when users initiate downloads or uploads, it will make it easier to constrain when it requires WiFi only. The inclusion of a requirement to declare foreground service types will allow the OS to know which parts can be tuned for lower power and which are needed to stay in the foreground.

Optimizations to internal broadcasts now also improve battery life and responsiveness. The creation of exact alarms can also greatly affect a device’s battery life, so in Android 14, newly installed apps that are not clocks or calendars must receive special permissions from the SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM permission before setting exact alarms.

Improvements to user customization

Because individual users may have specific needs, Android 14 is continuing to add further customization options that apps will have for accessibility and international features that include font and languages.

Starting in Android 14, users can now scale up their fonts to 200%, compared with the maximum font size on Pixel devices of 130%. In order to avoid issues that might happen when font sizes to too large, the OS will apply what is called nonlinear font scaling that will ensure text that’s already large enough doesn’t scale up at the same rate as smaller text and explode off the screen. These settings are available for users under the Font size option within “Accessibility > Display size and text” menu in the Android system.

The addition of a Grammatical Inflection API will allow developers to add support for gendered languages – particularly those languages that change according to the gender of the reader. That will allow app developers to more readily incorporate support via the API rather than relying on already existing formatting options that work on a per-message basis.

The preview is available now with setup instructions for running on an Android Emulator. To test apps for tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get running is using an emulator in tablet or foldable configuration mode using the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. As for phones, it’s possible to get going today by flashing a system image onto a Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5 or Pixel 4a (5G) device.

This is the first preview for Android 14 and platform stability is not expected until June. After that, the final release for the OS will be expected in about a month as usual for the operating system’s journey. Further details about the timeline are available on the Android 14 developer site.

Image: Google