After months and months of beta testing,Android 14has finally arrived in stable. There was a tremendous buildup of excitement around this release after the rather lacklusterAndroid 13, which only introduced some small refinements following the big Android 12 design refresh on Pixel phones. Android 14 certainly stays true to the look that Google established with Material You two years ago, but it adds much-needed refinement and customization to the mix. While the beta was buggier than usual, the final release is making up for this long period of bugs with tons of new features, thoughtful design improvements, and a more polished experience all over the place.
Android 14
Google’s 2023 Android release is a straight continuation of the last two releases, Android 12 and 13. The company is building out its Material You design language with more customization options, improves areas that were left languishing for a long time like the share sheet, and adds much-needed security improvements to accessibility services and sideloading processes.
Android 14: Design and interface
Android has been through three major design refresh cycles in its lifetime, and Android 14 is very clearly still part of the Material You redesign the company made with Android 12 in 2021. While the initial version of Material You was all about automatic theming, Google is giving you back a lot of manual controls with Android 14. It’s still nowhere near the number of custom options you had in Android 11, with different icon shapes, fonts, and quick-setting toggle designs to choose from. But one thing after the other.
Lock and home screen customization
While you’re still pretty constrained in your choice of style compared to One UI or even iOS, Android 14 makes things a lot better on Pixel phones. Much of this is enabled thanks to a big revamp to the Wallpaper & styles settings, which you can access by long-pressing an empty space on your home screen. Rather than smashing all your lock screen and home screen customization together in one place, the new design separates lock screen and home screen customization.
This separation is necessary because you’re able to finally make some more substantial tweaks to your lock screen other than tweaking the clock color and background. Android 14 offers eight different lock screen clocks, making it possible to give your phone a more customized appearance even before you unlock it. The clocks all have their own custom look on the always on display, too.
The designs range from colorful, bold, analog, default, and more. A tap on a smallClock color & sizebutton beneath the preview makes it possible to overrule the default Material You color the rest of your interface is using to make it stand out even more. You have a total of nine preset colors to choose from, though you may further tweak the look with a saturation slider, giving you a lot more choice than visible at first glance. Thesizebit here is a bit misleading, as you can only choose between dynamic and small, with the latter option banishing the clock to the top left corner where it would also go once you get notifications — no free scale that you can use here.
Further below, there is a new Shortcuts section. It finally lets you switch out the default home control and wallet shortcuts for something else that you might find more useful, though Google is taking baby steps here. Google only provides a handful of different options here, limiting you to the photo or video camera (which you can already access by double pressing the power button), do not disturb, flashlight, mute, and QR code scanning. Honestly, I wish Google retained home controls and quick wallet access in the long-press power menu, where they’ve been until Android 12. Given that this is how you access Google Assistant since that Android version, I don’t think I can acknowledge the company’s argument from back in the day that the long-press action is barely discoverable for the average user.
I am absolutely a fan of these additional customization options — the more, the merrier. At the same time, many of the new clock faces give off an amateurish vibe to me, with a playfulness to them that doesn’t quite match the clean, understated, and monochrome design that the uniform-looking Material You portrays elsewhere in the system — even with some new multicolor designs in the row right below the lock screen clocks customization that try to combat this. I think that Apple and Samsung solved this much more elegantly in their respective interfaces, with their lock screens clashing much less with the rest of the interface. I never thought I would say this, but Google may have designed itself into a corner with Material You.
Moving on to some more wallpaper tweaks that deserve to be highlighted. For one, emoji wallpapers, first introduced in Android 13’s June patch, are a boon to play with and help you create a 100% custom design without any skills required. It’s a great addition to the set of tools provided by the increasingly more powerful Wallpaper & styles app. The same goes for cinematic wallpapers that separate an image’s subject from the background and add a 3D effect to them, though personally, I’ve found these just a bit too unreliable.
Small visual tweaks galore
Google added further visual refinements to Android 14. On the lock screen, the At a Glance widget in the top right corner now only stretches over one line by default, though it retains its dual-line look on the home screen, making for a less smooth transition. The long-press menus on the home screen have been streamlined a bit, with a new, smoother animation when they pop up and a more tidy appearance, with many menu items showing up in a single bubble rather than having every single one in a single shape. Google has also switched to a dot-based page indicator to show which home screen you’re on rather than the solid line one.
The list of small tweaks continues with a new icon for silent mode, which now is a crossed out loud speaker rather than a crossed out bell. I’m not entirely sure about the motivation behind this, since a crossed out speaker suggests to me that all sounds are turned off even though you’re able to still have your media volume turned all the way up with silent mode activated.
Other changes include a new back arrow that now sits in a Material You-colored bubble, a new triangle-inspired mouse cursor for those who use a touchpad or mouse with their Android device (which could be relevant for the Pixel Tablet), new default profile images, and smaller tweaks to round out the Material Design 3 look, like proper
Themed icons remain in beta
Sadly, themed icons still remain in beta in Android 14. Google briefly experimented with forced themed icons, turning colorful existing icons into monochrome variants that could admittedly sometimes look plain bad. However, I still think that Google could use a slightly different route to work around this problem. Developers already need to supply notification icons in a monochrome format, and in most cases, they closely match the app icons already anyways. I’m sure opting for these in a forced monochrome theme would yield better results than just turning colorful icons monochrome — or worse, just leaving them colorful amidst a perfect monochrome theme.
Beautiful themed icons, until you swipe over tothe screen of shame
The politics of a decision like this are something else to consider, of course. It’s possible that some big app publishers wouldn’t be happy with Google just single-handedly changing carefully crafted brand identities that are supposed to live on users’ home screens.
New Easter egg
No major Android release is complete without a small Easter egg hidden in system settings, accessible by repeatedly tapping the version number underAbout phone → Android version.While Android 13’s Easter egg was a rather boring rehash of the one in Android 12, replacing bubbles with emojis, Android 14 is a tad more sophisticated.
When you pull up the Easter egg, the first thing you see is Android 14’s spacy NASA-inspired logo floating above a starry background. It’s nice to look at, but the action only really begins once you tap and hold the logo. Your phone will start vibrating and the stars in the background are accelerating, making you feel like you’re launching a space capsule. A new screen will open, revealing a space mini game where you may fly a little stylized spaceship to various planets and stars, with data on the celestial bodies displayed at the top and coordinates on your speed, velocity, and relative position compared to the bodies at the bottom. It’s a fun little game without much of a purpose other than exploration, but it can be a neat way to pass the time if you need to.
Android 14: New features
As much as I like to gush over design, that’s just one part of what warrants an Android update — many people would likely argue that they would like to see fewer changes for the sake of change and rather get new features. Android 14 delivers in this area as well, with one of the biggest additions being predictive back animation, something the company has been working on in Android 13 already, with Google calling it a multi-year release.
Predictive back gestures
In my book, predictive back gestures are the biggest new feature in Android 14. They have the potential to change the way you navigate on your phone completely, though it will take a long time until we’re fully there. The basic idea with predictive back navigation is to provide you with an idea of where that swipe back will take you. When you swipe in from the edge of your screen, supported apps can give you a glimpse of what other section within them you will navigate to next once you let go. You also get a preview of the home screen when the next move takes you there, similar to how the regular home gesture works right now.
When it works, it’s a great concept, but the crux is in the details right now. Much like themed icons, app developers have to enable support for this explicitly. Given that there is only limited success in getting developers to pick up on a small cosmetic tweak to their app icons, I suspect that implementing predictive back gestures across all the apps we have out there will take an even longer time.
In the Android 14 developer previews and betas, you had to enable predictive back gestures manually using developer options, and it was still pretty buggy up until the end. This might be another factor slowing down adoption of this feature, given that developers haven’t been able to properly test this up until closer to the final launch of Android 14.
New and much improved system share sheet
The state of Android’s system share sheet has been poor for a long time, to say the least. A few years ago, it was abhorrently slow if you have more than just a handful of apps installed that you could share content to, and even with that fixed, direct share targets at the top have often been rather irrelevant. Many apps have long opted to create their custom share sheets, offering a hand-picked selection of other apps to share to as well as some powerful in-app actions you couldn’t otherwise achieve with the system share sheet.
While things have gotten better with recent Android releases, Android 14 attempts to fix some of the biggest remaining problems. First and foremost, Android 14 decouples the share sheet from system updates, making it a component that the company can update without pushing a full system update. Over the years, Google has done that for a lot of components, which allows many older phones that otherwise don’t get system updates anymore to keep up to date with newer features. This strategy also allows Google to iterate faster, making it possible to push updates to the share sheet year-round, to all devices running Android 14 and higher.
Along with this rather technical change, there are some real tangible improvements. For one, Android 14 makes it possible for apps to add their custom in-app share actions right to the system share sheet. Google Chrome is one of the first apps to take advantage of this, omitting its custom share sheet with options like screenshotting, copying the link, sending to your devices, printing, creating a QR code, and more altogether in Android 14. Instead, the app adds these options to the system share sheet itself.
It will likely take some time for all apps to join in on this, but in the long term, the new share sheet will lead to a much more consistent sharing experience across all the apps you use on Android. Developers no longer have to use resources to recreate this system feature, making both their and their users’ lives easier.
The new experience is almost right in linewith a mockup I created in an editorialin two years, and I’d like to think that someone and Google saw it and found the idea good enough to implement it. Other than the custom actions, Android 14 makes the share sheet denser, adding up to five share targets per line.
Health Connect as system service
Google made another similar move for Health Connect, which has been promoted to a pre-installed app for all Android 14 devices. Health Connect is a relatively new effort from Google that allows all kinds of fitness apps to sync their data to it in order to make it available for sharing with other services. With it, your calorie counting app could tap into Fitbit’s step counts. In contrast to existing solutions, Health Connect runs locally on your phone and doesn’t require sending your data through any additional servers, so it’s in theory a more private and secure option.
Adoption of Health Connect has previously been rather lackluster, given that for many it’s long been yet another app that needs to be downloaded from the Play Store. With Health Connect becoming a part of Google’s pre-installed Mainline apps, developers and users will be able to rely on it being present and use it more regularly.
Less battery drain thanks to streamlined background operations
Android has always been more friendly to background apps than iOS, but that has always had downsides: poorly or maliciously programmed apps could quickly run down your battery, be it for issues with the code or to acquire more data about what you’re doing on your phone. Google introduced measures to combat rogue background activities, only allowing certain kinds of tasks to be performed while the screen is off or while you’re using another app a long time ago, and Android 14 further refines this system.
In Android 14, Google reserves so-called foreground services to the highest priority user-facing tasks only, so apps can’t use as much power when they’re running in the background. Google also further restricts apps from using so-called exact alarms. As the name implies, these are actions that have to run at a specific time. Google has encouraged developers to not use these unless absolutely necessary for a long time now, and apps targeting Android 14 will have to acquire a user’s specific permission to run exact alarms. The only services exempted from this are calendar and alarm apps, which naturally need to be able to fire notifications at the right time.
Google is also tweaking Android’s internal broadcast system. This is getting pretty technical, but the gist is that Android communicates all kinds of events to apps, like when some battery level is reached or when airplane mode is turned on or off. In some instances, these events are queued up in Android 14, which should allow your phone to wake up less often and thus draw less power in the background.
In total, these changes should lead to just a little longer battery life in standby.
Other improvements related to the battery is a new charging animation that briefly adds a pill-shaped outline around the battery indicator to make it clearer that you’ve properly plugged your phone in as well as a new ultra-low battery warning that gives you a heads up that it will shut down any moment.
New keyboard shortcuts
Android 14 makes clear that Google is focusing on bigger screens again with theGoogle Pixel Tabletand theGoogle Pixel Fold. I’ve already mentioned the new mouse cursor, but the company is also adding a whole slew of keyboard shortcuts to Android 14 that haven’t existed before. It might be possible that the company plans to add a keyboard accessory to the Pixel Tablet later, or at least meant to do that at some point. We’vecovered this in detail all the way back in May, but if you just want the gist of it, here you go:
Small but welcome improvements
Apart from these big points, Google added quite a few more tweaks to Android 14. I’ll list them in a bullet format to make them easier to scan:
Android 14: Security and privacy
It’s debatable whether you’re able to talk much about privacy on an OS provided by the biggest advertising network in the world — we will likely never see a way to fully stop apps from tracking us on Android, an option that exists on iOS. However, Google is still always working on important security and privacy upgrades in Android within the confines of its business, and that’s no different for Android 14. It offers improved PIN entry privacy, better protection from malware, and revamped media sharing options.
Improved PIN entry options
The biggest user-facing change in Android 14 comes in the form of the revamped PIN entry form. For one, Google will now longer display which numbers you are actually entering in the PIN entry field, replacing them with nondescript and beautiful Material You shapes by default. Like on the last Android 13 feature drop, you can also enable enhanced PIN privacy, which disables all unnecessary animations, like the buttons you’re tapping lighting up.
In addition to this, Google has finally budged and now allows you to log in without having to hit the enter key when you have a PIN with six digits or more. While this system is inherently less secure than one where an attacker doesn’t know how many digits there are to a PIN, it makes having a longer PIN more convenient and could woo more people over to using one. If you don’t like this added convenience, you can turn off the enter-free PIN entry via the system settings or right when you set up your PIN code.
Better protection from accessibility services-abusing malware
Google has been implementing more rigid rules for sideloading apps from outside the Play Store and other official app repositories over the years, and Android 14 goes a step further. Google restricts the sideloading of apps that target an SDK version lower than 23, which corresponds to Android 6, introduced 2015. Since many new security features have been implemented in Android 6 and newer, a lot of malware intentionally targets outdated, more powerful APIs and convince people to install these apps via sideloading. The change will make this harder for bad actors to get people to install their apps.
It’s possible to bypass this block with the adbinstall –bypass-low-target-sdk-block FILENAME.apkcommand (where you replace FILENAME with the package you want to install), so if you rely on a legitimate but old app, you may still keep using it.
In another attempt to limit the havoc false accessibility services can wreak, Google offers a new option for app developers to limit the visibility of their apps to disability-focused accessibility services only. This new option only allows accessibility services that are officially screened by Play Protect and the Play Store to see what you’re doing in potentially security-focused apps. Since malware and phishing software often use accessibility services to get around security features, this is a welcome change, even if it may break a few legitimate apps that rely on accessibility services in the process.
Image permission changes/revamped permission controls
Android vs. iOS — spot the difference
Photos saved to your phone can contain precious secrets and private information, ranging from private nudes to images of documents like your ID or social security number. That’s why it can be scary to provide apps full access to your images just because you want to upload a single image to a service. To combat this, Google is adding a way to grant apps access to only select photos. A new permission dialog offers three tiers: “Allow access to all photos,” “select photos,” or “Don’t allow.” This is very much in line with how iOS has done it for quite some time now, but a welcome change nonetheless.
Android 14: Material You is growing up
Android 14 is all about improving something that already works. There aren’t too many big new features, but the ones that Google did add are more than welcome. You can finally customize your lock screen to an extent not seen for a long time, with custom clocks, colors, and shortcuts. The system share sheet is getting better, with it possibly finally getting on a path to get rid of share sheets altogether. There is additional security hardening thanks to sideloading restrictions.
All in all, you will instantly recognize your Pixel phone post-update, but when you dig deeper, you can make it yours even more. This is the ideal continuation of what Material You wants to be, with deeper and more mature theming options making it possible to have an experience catered right to you. I just hope that we will get less tacky custom clocks in the future.
