Android 14 enters its Developer Preview 2. The opportunity to confirm and highlight some new features of the future update of the operating system.
The development of Android 14 continues and is now entering a new phase: Developer Preview 2. Currently, the Google teams are meeting the established deadlines. Therefore, we are on our way to testing the beta 1 version of the mobile operating system in April. This will be a bit more accessible to the general public. As a reminder, DP2 is still a very young version of the OS that is mainly used to help developers tailor their respective apps for future updates.
Privacy of photos saved on the smartphone
The release of Developer Preview 2 is an opportunity to confirm a novelty, inspired by iOS, that we had already heard about: access authorization only to selected photos and not to the entire gallery. In fact, the official Android blog describes a new privacy option in Android 14. If an app needs to access media saved on your device, you can make sure to grant it this right only for some images and videos that you’ve chosen.
So you will have three options in total.
- Allow access to all photos: the entire media library is accessible to the app.
- Select photos: the user selects the photos and videos that the app can temporarily access.
- Do not allow : access to all media on the smartphone is completely denied.
Android 13 had already laid the groundwork for this to work, but Android 14 takes it one step further by forcing the hand of third-party apps that haven’t, or can’t, make the necessary changes to provide this control enhancement. personal data option
regional preferences
Another prominent option in Android 14 Developer Preview 2: regional preferences. This item in the device settings allows ” Users to customize temperature units, first day of the week, and numbering systems“. So, “a European living in the US may prefer temperature units to be Celsius instead of Fahrenheit and for apps to consider Monday as the start of the week instead of the US default Sunday.“, we read in the official article.
Other innovations have also been confirmed such as better APIs to improve the user experience in alternative app stores and make the Google Play Store less ubiquitous in Android 14. There is also talk of reducing the number of notifications that the user cannot dismiss and optimize performance through more efficient management of RAM and background applications.
As a reminder, currently only Google Pixel smartphones support Android 14. We’ll have to wait,first, beta 2, to see devices from other brands enter the program. This will no doubt be one of the Google I/O 2023 announcements. You can try installing Developer Preview, but we strongly recommend against it if you are completely new to this.
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