Android 14 Developer Preview now available for Pixel devices

(Image Courtesy: Google)

Google has released the first developer preview for Android 14 on Pixel devices.

If you own a Pixel 4a, Pixel 5 or 5a, Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, Pixel 6a or the Pixel 7/7 Pro, you can load up the developer preview for an early look at the features expected with the next major Android release.

The preview, in particular, focuses on increasing operability between various devices and form factors that run Android.

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Google says that Android 14, “builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors,” with the addition of window class sizes, layouts and app quality guidance's for large screens.

It also streamlines background activity with updates to the way apps that run in the background are handled. Google says it’s, “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.”

For customisation, Android 14 allows users to scale up fonts to 200 percent, a 70 percent increase from Android 13 that allowed for a maximum of 130 percent.

For text that gets too large, Google will apply a non-linear font scaling curve that ensures text, “that is already large enough doesn’t increase at the same rate as smaller text.”

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Android 14 will also block apps that have compatibility lower than Android 6.0. Google is doing this to prevent runtime exploits in older versions of Android.

If you are a developer or someone who just wants to try the preview out, head here. Do remember that this is the first release preview, which means there are bound to be bugs and other inconsistences, so it’s better to try this out on an alternate device.