San Francisco, NFAPost: Enhancing its capabilities to take on next challenges, Google’s Android launched the first of four planned public beta releases of Android 14.
According to the company officials, the beta version release is happening after two developer previews. The first beta is also the first release that anyone can install over-the-air, assuming they have a supported Pixel device, going back to the Pixel 4a 5G (but not the Pixel 4).
There’s no official support for non-Google phones yet. As always, keep in mind that these are betas for a reason and still mostly meant for developers who want to test their apps against this new version and early adopters who just can’t wait for the stable release.
It is interesting to note that more details of Android 14 will be released at Google I/O next month.
According to TechCrunch report, there aren’t many new features in this beta version, though there are two user-facing UI updates worth calling out.
The first is a new back arrow (yes — we’ve reached the point in mobile OS history where new back arrows are pretty much the most exciting thing).
As Google notes, the gesture navigation experience now “includes a more prominent back arrow while interacting with an app to help improve back gesture understanding and usefulness.” This arrow will match your wallpaper or device theme. Exciting stuff.
Developers will now also be able to add custom actions to the system sharesheet, and the sharesheet will now be smarter about how it ranks your sharing targets.
