Nowadays, Google’s Android development cycle runs on a rather predictable cadence. Finally, the company has launched the first of four planned public beta releases of Android 14 after two developer previews. As with previous releases, the first beta is also the first to go back to Pixel 4a 5G (not Pixel 4) and be wirelessly installable for anyone with a supported Pixel device.
Non-Google phones still don’t have any official support. As always, keep in mind that these are betas for a reason and are 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. These things make and will break.
For the most part, there aren’t many new features in this beta, but there are two user-centric UI updates worth checking out. The first is the new back arrow (yes, we’ve reached the point where the new back arrow is the most exciting thing in the history of mobile operating systems). As Google notes, the gesture navigation experience now comprises “a more prominent back arrow when interacting with the app to enhance the understanding and usability of the back gesture.” This arrow matches your wallpaper or device theme. These features are quite exciting.
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It will also enable developers to include custom actions in the system share sheet. This would make the share sheet smarter regarding how it ranks shared goals.
Apart from this, there is nothing much new here. Similar to the new privacy settings previously announced by Google, per-app language settings are present.
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We can expect to get more insights regarding what’s new in Android 14. And we may get to see more user-facing features at Google I/O next month. For the time being, this seems to be another evolutionary release.
