Google Releases First Android 14 Developer Preview

Google is giving developers their first crack at the next edition of Android, which means users of Google’s mobile operating system also have their first hints of what might come to their screens later this year—or next year, or never. 

Google’s description of the first developer preview of Android 14(Opens in a new window), released Wednesday, emphasizes making the OS fit better on tablets. 

“Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors,” engineering VP Dave Burke says in a blog post. “Our goal is to make optimizing your app across everywhere Android runs easier with every release.”

Android 12L, shipped last summer, began a reboot of sorts for Google’s efforts to cultivate an ecosystem of tablet apps for Android, efforts that later this year will include a Pixel tablet. But Wednesday’s coder-oriented post doesn’t offer many hints about what Android 14 might look like on such a device, instead emphasizing how this release will help developers ship apps that function consistently on a wider spectrum of Android gadgets. 

A “Customization” section, however, notes one upcoming feature that may have immediate appeal to any of you who long ago set your browser to enlarge text for easier reading: “Starting in Android 14, users will be able to scale up their font to 200%. Previously, the maximum font size scale on Pixel devices was 130%.”

Android 14 will also add new language options, including tools to help apps address users with the correct grammar for a gendered language like French or Spanish.  

The post then outlines improvements to various background processes and systems to upgrade battery life and system responsiveness, plus tighter security controls to thwart known workarounds by malware attackers. There’s no mention of additional privacy controls to stop the collection of data by apps, a major benefit of Android 13. News of that and other features may come with later developer releases and at Google’s I/O developer conference, in whatever form it takes in late spring or early summer.

Burke’s post says Google expects Android 14 to reach “Platform Stability” in June, after which developers will have “several weeks” to test their code against it before 14’s public release. The usual and unfortunate pattern there is that Google’s Pixel devices get the update first, followed by other Android devices that don’t run stock Android and therefore require aftermarket customization to adapt Google’s code. 

How much later? Android 13 shipped on Aug. 15 for Pixel devices, but Samsung’s Galaxy S22 phones didn’t get that update for its heavily modified flavor of Android until the end of October. That lag isn’t a great look, but it beats the scenario with many old Android phones that no longer Android updates at all.