If you’ve been looking to run the upcoming version of Android on your device then the time is almost now. Soon, we will be seeing the final version, or as it is known in development circles, the release candidate, of Android 14.
As per the timeline released when the first developer preview was announced 4 months ago, we should be receiving the fourth and final beta of the upcoming version of Android this month – and we have – and the release candidate in a few weeks/months.
A few days ago, Beta 4 of Android 14 was released to Google’s Pixel devices, including the latest Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet, which were announced at Google’s annual developer conference back in May and went on sale within a week of each other late last month.
While there are a number of other non-Pixel devices that are part of the testing phase for Android 14, there’s no word on the availability of Beta 4 for those devices as of the time of publishing this. In the past, most device makers have skipped releasing the final beta to their devices participating in the developer preview and beta testing, opting to, instead, just go ahead and issue the final update as soon as it is ready.
Android 14 Beta 4 brings with it several features and feature updates as well as the usual overall housekeeping.
On whatever we refer to as “stock Android”, and context here is important since we usually mean Google’s idea of Android and not the barebones Android that’s shipped as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that the likes of Amazon, Huawei and others get and tweak to their satisfaction, users will be able to pick various stock profile pictures (anything from animals to planets…) in case they have multiple accounts on their device(s).
The planets theme is strong in Android 14 as users will encounter it when they go to their device’s About device/phone page in the settings app. Here, the Android 14 theme logo (see the featured image above) gets a life of its own becoming an interesting Easter egg that lifts off to space. We can’t wait to try this out.
New to Pixel device users but old to the rest of us that are accustomed to custom user interfaces from other Android device makers like Samsung, Oppo, Tecno and the like is the ability to unlock a device using a PIN and not needing to hit another button in order to confirm the unlocking.
Still keeping with the small tweaks and details, Android 14 will let users know which year their phone was manufactured.
As we have heard before, Android 14 will release with out-of-the-box support for foldable devices. Since foldable devices mimick tablet behaviour on their expanded displays and Google has a brand new tablet to look after and worry about in the Pixel Tablet, it goes without saying that tablet support has also been factored in. Both experiences are more pronounced now in Beta 4 of Android 14. This is so because everything we’re seeing in Beta 4 is final and is what we can expect to see in the release candidate bar any last minute bugs that need quashing.
“Beta 4 is our second Platform Stable Android 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviours are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play to devices running Android 14 at the official API level,” writes Dave Burke, Google’s VP of Engineering.
