Google releases second Android 14 developer preview

March 10, 2023 in Android by Brenton ‐ 2 min read

The second developer preview for Android 14 has now been released.

From Dave Burke, over on the Android Developers blog announcing the second Android 14 developer preview:

Today, we’re releasing the second Developer Preview of Android 14, building on the work of the first developer preview of Android 14 from last month with additional enhancements to privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to refine the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more.

Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program 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.

The second developer preview of Android 14 brings a number of changes from the first preview, including a new permission dialog when an app tries to access a user’s photo library, improvements in the UI and API interface for the new credentials manager, optimisations to Android’s memory management system when an app is running in the background:

Several seconds after an app goes into the cached state, background work is disallowed outside of conventional Android app lifecycle APIs such as foreground services, JobScheduler, or WorkManager. Background work is disallowed an order of magnitude faster than on Android 13.

There are also a number of changes to the APIs the alternate app marketplaces can use, as well as new Android settings menus for regional settings.

As noted on Twitter, Google also released a swathe of library updates including Lifecycle 2.6.0, RecyclerView 1.3.0 and a number of release candidates for other libraries.

Google continues to target platform stability for June, and is likely to announce more consumer-oriented changes in Android in May at Google I/O. For now the beta program remains unavailable, so the only way to install Android 14 is to flash it onto selected devices. Google warns that this preview build is not ready for daily use yet.