Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
Making Android work well for each and every one of the billions of Android users is a collaborative process between us, Android hardware manufacturers, and you, our developer community.
Today we're releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 14, and your feedback in these previews is a critical part of making Android better for everyone. Android 14 continues our work to improve your productivity as developers, along with enhancements to performance, privacy, security, and user customization. This preview is just the beginning, and we’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release cycle.
Android continues to deliver enhancements and new features year-round, and your Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program feedback plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 14 developer site has lots more information about the preview, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.
Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. To help you build apps that adapt to different screen sizes, we've created window size classes, sliding pane layout, Activity embedding, and box with constraints and more, all supported in Jetpack Compose. With every release, our goal is to make it easier for you to optimize your app across all Android surfaces.
To help streamline getting your apps ready we have updated our app quality guidance for large screens, and provided additional learning opportunities around building for large screens and foldables. The large screen gallery contains proven design patterns along with design inspiration around the markets that your app supports such as social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading apps.
Multi-device experiences are a big part of the future of Android. You can get started today with the Cross device SDK preview, allowing you to build rich experiences that intuitively work across different devices and form factors, and there's more to come.
Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.
It's more complicated than necessary to perform some background work, such as downloading large files when WiFi is available. We're creating a standard path for this work to simplify your app development and potentially improve the user experience. We're also being more opinionated about how foreground services should be used, reserving them for only the highest priority user-facing tasks so that Android can improve resource consumption and battery life.
In Android 14, we are making changes to existing Android APIs (Foreground Services and JobScheduler) including adding new functionality for user-initiated data transfers, along with an updated requirement to declare foreground service types. The user-initiated data transfer job will make managing user initiated downloads and uploads easier, particularly when they require constraints such as downloading on Wi-Fi only. The requirement to declare foreground service types allows you to clearly define the intent of the background work of your app while making it clear which use-cases are appropriate for foreground services. In addition, Google Play will be rolling out new policies to ensure the appropriate use of these APIs, with more details coming soon.
We’ve made several optimizations to the internal broadcast system to improve battery life and responsiveness. While most of the optimizations are internal to Android and should not impact your apps, we have adjusted how apps receive context-registered broadcasts once the app goes into a cached state. Broadcasts to context-registered receivers may be queued and only delivered to the app once it comes out of the cached state. Furthermore, some repeating context-registered broadcasts, such as BATTERY_CHANGED, may be merged into one final broadcast before it is delivered once the app comes out of the cached state.
The invocation of exact alarms can significantly affect the device's resources, such as battery life. So in Android 14, newly installed apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that are not clocks or calendars must request the user to grant them the SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM special permission before setting exact alarms. Apps can direct users to the settings page via an intent to toggle this permission, but we encourage you to evaluate your use cases and choose more flexibly scheduled alternatives when possible.
Clock and calendar apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that rely on exact alarms as part of their core app workflow will be able to declare the USE_EXACT_ALARM normal permission instead (granted on install). Apps will not be able to publish a version of their app to the Play store with this permission in the manifest unless they qualify based on the policy language.
We're continuing to make sure that Android users can tune their experience around their individual needs, including enhanced accessibility and internationalization features.
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%.
You can dynamically update your app's localeConfig with LocaleManager.setOverrideLocaleConfig to customize the set of languages displayed in the per-app language list in Android Settings. This allows you to customize the language list per region, run A/B experiments, and provide updated locales if your app utilizes server-side localization pushes.
IMEs can now use LocaleManager.getApplicationLocales to know the UI language of the current app to update the keyboard language.
The Grammatical Infection API allows you to more easily add support for users who speak languages which have grammatical gender. For example,
Masculine: “Vous êtes abonné à...”
Feminine: “Vous êtes abonnée à…”
Neutral: “Abonnement à…activé”
Grammatical gender is inherent to the language and cannot be easily worked around in some non-English languages. This new API lowers the effort to support viewer gender (who’s viewing the UI; not who’s being talked about) as compared to using the SelectFormat in ICU which must be applied on a per string basis.
To show personalized translations, you just need to add translations inflected for each grammatical gender for impacted languages and integrate the API.
Apps targeting Android 14 must indicate if dynamic Context.registerReceiver() usage should be treated as "exported" or "unexported", a continuation of the manifest-level work from previous releases. Learn more here.
To prevent malicious apps from intercepting intents, apps targeting Android 14 are restricted from sending intents internally that don't specify a package. Learn more here.
Dynamic code loading (DCL) introduces outlets for malware and exploits, since dynamically downloaded executables can be unexpectedly manipulated, causing code injection. Apps targeting Android 14 require dynamically loaded files to be marked as read-only. Learn more here.
Malware often targets older API levels to bypass security and privacy protections that have been introduced in newer Android versions. To protect against this, starting with Android 14, apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 cannot be installed. This specific version was chosen because some malware apps use a targetSdkVersion of 22 to avoid being subjected to the runtime permission model introduced in 2015 by Android 6.0 (API level 23).
On devices that upgrade to Android 14, any apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 will remain installed.
You can test apps targeting an older API level using the following ADB command:
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block FILENAME.apk
We recently announced the alpha release of Credential Manager, a new Jetpack API that allows you to simplify your users' authentication journey, while also increasing security with support of passkeys. Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors and more convenient for users (they require just a biometric swipe to securely sign in on any device). Read more here.
We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.
OpenJDK 17 Support - This preview includes access to 300 OpenJDK 17 classes. We are working hard to fully enable Java 17 language features in upcoming developer previews. These include record classes, multi-line strings and pattern matching instanceof. Thanks to Google Play system updates (Project Mainline), over 600M devices are enabled to receive the latest Android Runtime (ART) updates that include these changes. This is part of our commitment to give apps a more consistent, secure environment across devices, and to deliver new features and capabilities to users independent of platform releases.
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The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. For phones, you can get started 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. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.
For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:
We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This initial preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so we're making it available by manual download only. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.
As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.
For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.
Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Posted by Vishal Das, Community Manager
This year the Google Developer Educators India team launched the “Android Learn and Inspire Series” for Android Developers who were eager to learn Jetpack Compose and inspire others to upskill. Meet the developers who completed the series and hosted workshops on Jetpack Compose to find out their motivation to teach others!
I experimented with a few methods in the Android Learn and Inspire series. There are a few that I found quite effective.
One tip I would like to share is let’s bring those good engineers in Android who are expert in solving Android problems but shy in sharing knowledge.
Posted by Ryan Fitzgibbon, Product ManagerIn February we announced the Privacy Sandbox on Android, with the goal of bringing new, more private advertising solutions to mobile.
Over the course of 2022, we've published design proposals and released a number of Developer Previews. We appreciate all of the feedback we've received which has helped us refine and improve these proposals.
Beginning early next year we plan to rollout the initial Privacy Sandbox Beta to Android 13 mobile devices, so that developers can take the next steps in testing these new solutions. We'll start with a small percentage of devices and increase over time. Note that Developer Previews will continue to be released and this is where we’ll first deliver the latest features for early feedback before being released on production devices.
Today, we're sharing more details about the Privacy Sandbox Beta so that developers can get prepared.
The Privacy Sandbox Beta will be available for ad tech and app developers who wish to test the ads-related APIs as part of their solutions.
To participate in the Beta program, organizations who wish to test the Beta on their own Android 13 devices can request access for a limited number of devices, plus register any apps which will utilize the Sandbox APIs. For the SDK Runtime, we’ll have a closed beta for developers to test Runtime-enabled SDK distribution to select apps. Because of the coordination required to test the SDK Runtime on production devices, we expect this beta to involve a limited number of partners who can dedicate resources to support this testing. If you’re interested in participating, please register your interest.
To utilize the Beta release, developers will need to compile their solutions with an API level 33 SDK extension update that is coming soon.
We’ve heard from many advertisers and publishers about the role they can play in testing these new technologies. For companies that rely on third party solutions for ad serving or ad measurement, we recommend working with your providers to understand their testing roadmaps and how you can participate in early testing of Privacy Sandbox.
We want to thank everyone who has engaged on the Android Privacy Sandbox, and look forward to continued feedback as we enter this next phase of testing."
Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer
We launched Jetpack Compose over a year ago, and have been busy improving it ever since. We’ve added new features and invented powerful tools to make your experience developing Android UI as productive, intuitive and fun as possible. So, if you're starting a new app, it's time to write it with Compose! With Material Design 3 support, new Bill Of Materials, Compose for Wear OS Stable and Android TV (alpha), Compose Camp, and many other pieces of news… It's an exciting release!
Today we’re releasing a new stable version of Compose, with some exciting features and news.
First of all, we’ve heard from you how it can be daunting to track versions across different artifacts that might go on different release schedules, so we’re now publishing, together with every Stable release of any of the Compose artifacts, a Bill of Materials, or BOM, to make your life easier.
Our first BOM release, Compose October ‘22, brings support for Staggered Grids, drawing Text directly to Canvas, Pull to Refresh, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes.
A BOM is a Maven module that declares a set of libraries with their versions. It will greatly simplify the way you define Compose library versions in your Gradle dependencies block, especially now that we moved the various Jetpack Compose libraries to independent versioning schemes. Instead of defining each version separately, which can become cumbersome and prone to errors when library versions start to differ, you now only need to define one BOM version and all Compose library versions will be extracted from that. We will publish a new version of the BOM every time a Compose artifact has a new stable release, so moving from stable release to stable release is going to be much simpler.
dependencies { // Import the Compose BOM implementation platform('androidx.compose:compose-bom:2022.10.00') // Declare dependencies for the desired Compose libraries without versions implementation 'androidx.compose.foundation:foundation' androidTestImplementation 'androidx.compose.ui:ui-test-junit4' ...}
Behind the scenes, we’re always working on improving Compose performance. The October ‘22 release includes a major refactor of how Modifiers work under the hood. While you will not notice anything changing in the APIs, this refactor paves the way for greatly improving Modifier performance. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes, and what’s planned for the near future in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.
Accessibility is always a first-class citizen for Compose, and this release contains a behavior change that helps fix an Accessibility bug with Popups and Dialogs: their maximum elevation is decreased from 30dp to 8dp. Your app will be impacted only if it uses a custom dialog or popup implementation with an elevation higher than 8dp. The release notes contain more information about the change, including a way to override the new behavior as an interim solution (keep in mind that we always recommend using 8dp maximum when customizing popups or dialogs).
We added a lot of new functionality to Compose. Here are some highlights:
LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid
LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid
DrawScope.drawText
FontVariation
pullRefresh
LookAheadLayout
Today we also announce the first stable release of the Compose Material 3 library! You can build an app using Compose and theme it according to Material Design 3, our latest iteration of Material Design. Use Material Design 3 to further customize your app’s colors, typography and shapes to make your brand stand out! The library contains fresh and updated versions of many UI components, such as buttons, cards, checkboxes, switches, navigation bars, drawers, and many more, with support for others on its way. See a list of all the supported components in the documentation and learn more in this blog post.
To help you adopt Material 3 check out our new migration guide with clear guidance on how Material 2 concepts translate to Material 3. The default template in Android Studio Flamingo now uses Material 3, to get you up and running in no time. We’ve also updated many of our sample apps, tutorials, templates, and codelabs to use Material 3 so you can learn as you go!
Developing your app using Jetpack Compose is much easier with the new and improved tools around it. We’ve added tons of new features to Android Studio to improve your workflow and efficiency:
Android Studio Dolphin is the latest stable release, bringing you:
Android Studio Electric Eel contains beta features, like:
Android Studio Flamingo contains canary features such as:
Today we also launch the first alpha version of Relay, a design-to-code solution for improving designer-developer collaboration. Designers create UI components using the Figma plugin, and developers use the Android Studio plugin to automatically use these components in their apps. The generated components are composable functions and can be integrated directly into your Compose app. Learn more about Relay in the documentation.
In July we released the first Stable version of Compose for Wear OS, ready to build production apps. Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building UIs for Wear OS apps. We’ve included over twenty Compose UI components that were designed specifically for Wearables, like TimeText, PositionIndicator, and ScalingLazyColumn.
TimeText
PositionIndicator
ScalingLazyColumn
We’re also continuing to make it easier to design, develop, and test apps for large screens such as foldables, tablets, and Chrome OS. The material3-window-size-class library graduated to Stable, giving you a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints to work with. Large screen designs often contain staggered grids, and the addition of LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid will help implement these.
material3-window-size-class
Posted by Kat Kuan, Developer Relations Engineer, Android
Jetpack Compose is Android's modern toolkit that simplifies Android UI development. It's already used by thousands of apps around the world such as Twitter, Airbnb and Google Play; if you're not already using it, it's a great time to start. To make learning Compose even easier, we are launching Compose Camp, a series of in-person and virtual sessions where you can learn how to build Android apps with Jetpack Compose alongside your peers. Grab your “camping gear” and see how you can participate in a Compose Camp near you!Jetpack Compose accelerates app development by enabling you to use and maintain less code, giving you intuitive & powerful APIs so you can leverage the best of Android when building compelling experiences for your users. Google is committed to increasing opportunities for anyone to learn Android development, so we're making learning the latest best practices more accessible in ways that suit different learning styles. We’ve heard how enjoyable and impactful it can be to learn in a group setting from many of you, which is why we’re launching Compose Camp around the world. You can learn how to build Android apps with Compose with the support of peers and “camp leaders” to guide you along the way.
Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing
A medical game for doctors, a language game for kids, a scary game for horror lovers and an escape room game for thrill seekers! In this latest batch of #WeArePlay stories, we’re celebrating the founders behind a wonderful variety of games from all over the world. Have a read and get gaming!
Posted by Alex Rocha - Developer Relations Engineer Manager, Ryan Ausanka-Crues - Eng Manager, Multi-device development, Stella Loh - Product Manager, Multi-device development
Today we’re launching our Developer Preview of the new Cross device SDK for Android. First announced during the Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device development session, our Cross device SDK allows developers to build rich multi-device experiences with a simple and intuitive set of APIs. This SDK abstracts away the intricacies involved with working with device discovery, authentication, and connection protocols, allowing you to focus on what matters most—building delightful user experiences and connecting these experiences across a variety of form factors and platforms.
This initial release contains a set of rich APIs centered around the core functionality of Device discovery, Secure connections, and Multi-device Sessions.
In turn, this will allow you to build compelling cross-device experiences by enabling and simplifying the following use cases:
Discovering and authorizing communication with nearby devices. Sharing an app’s current state with the same app on another device. Starting the app on a secondary device without having to keep the app running in background. Establishing secure connections for devices to communicate with each other. Enabling task handoff where the user starts a task on one device, and can easily continue on another device.
Starting today with a Developer Preview for Android phones and tablets, the Cross device SDK will be available later for other Android surfaces and non-Android OSs.
The Cross device SDK provides a software abstraction layer that handles all aspects of cross-device connectivity, leveraging wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Ultra-wide band; our SDK does all the heavy-lifting under the hood, offering you a modular,connectivity-agnostic API that supports bi-directional communication between devices and is backward compatible to Android 8. In addition, apps will not have to declare or request Runtime Permissions for any of the underlying connectivity protocols used (such as BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_SCAN, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, etc.), and the user can allow apps to connect to only the device(s) they selected.
Head over to our developer guide to get started and try out the Developer Preview of the Cross device SDK for Android. Make sure to check out our Rock Paper Scissor sample app (Kotlin and Java) on GitHub for a demonstration on how to work with the various APIs and our Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device development session for a general overview of the SDK.
We’d love to hear from you during this initial Developer Preview launch to help us shape the SDK and influence future roadmapping, so please share your feedback and let us know your experience with the SDK!
Posted by Anna Bernbaum, Product Manager, Ataul Munim, Developer Relations Engineer
val clickable: Clickable = generateClickable()
val button: Button = Button.Builder(this, clickable) .setIconContent("icon_exercise")
.setContentDescription("Start workout")
.build()
val theme = Colors(
/*primary=*/ 0xFFD0BCFF.toInt(), /*onPrimary=*/ 0xFF381E72.toInt(),
/*surface=*/ 0xFF202124.toInt(), /*onSurface=*/ 0xFFFFFFFF.toInt()
)
val buttonColors = ButtonColors.secondaryButtonColors(theme)
val chipColors = ChipColors.primaryChipColors(theme)
val timeline = Timeline.fromLayoutElement( PrimaryLayout.Builder(deviceParameters)
.setPrimaryLabelTextContent(
Text.Builder(this, "1 run this week")
.setTypography(Typography.TYPOGRAPHY_CAPTION1)
.setColor(argb(theme.primary))
.setContent(
MultiButtonLayout.Builder()
.addButtonContent(
Button. Builder(this, clickable)
.setIconContent("icon_run")
.setButtonColors(buttonColors)
.setContentDescription("Run")
Button.Builder(this, clickable )
.setIconContent("icon_yoga")
.setContentDescription("Yoga")
) .addButtonContent(
Button.Builder(this, clickable)
. setIconContent("icon_cycle")
.setContentDescription("Cycle")
.setPrimaryChipContent(
CompactChip.Builder(this, "More", clickable, deviceParameters)
.setChipColors(chipColors)
.jpg)
