Heya, here are some more articles I recently published about Android 14. Check them out!

- Android 14 may bring better support for keyboards with touchpad gestures and modifier key remapping

- Android 14’s regional preferences feature could tell apps to use your preferred calendar and number system

- Android 14 adds new features to make third-party app stores work even better

The first Beta for the Privacy Sandbox on Android begins rolling out today to eligible devices.

"Eligible" devices likely means devices running Android 13 with extension SDK level 4 or later or devices on Android 14 DP1. It's an A/B test, though, so you may not get it.

You'll see a notification if your device has been selected to participate in the Beta.

Interesting: Google is introducing Partial Custom Tabs, so apps can open links in a tab that only takes up part of the screen. You can customize the tab height in pixels. This works with a handful of browsers, including Chrome, with additional support coming soon.

Apparently this has been supported since Chrome 107 and version 1.5.0-alpha01 of androidx.browser. Stable version 1.5.0 of androidx.browser was just released a few days ago, though.

Google says it is working with its ecosystem partners to harden the security of firmware (software that runs on processors excluding the AP, like the baseband), as they are a critical part of the attack surface of Android devices.

In particular, they are exploring and enabling compiler-based sanitizers (BoundSan, IntSan) and other exploit mitigations (CFI, kCFI, Shadow Call Stack, Stack Canaries) as well as enabling further memory safety features in firmware.

Because bare metal targets are severely resource-constrained compared to the AP, Google is choosing to harden the most exposed attack surface while minimizing any performance/stability impact.

In addition, Google has also scaled its fuzzing activities to allow fuzzers to run in perpetuity (continuous fuzzing), in the hopes of finding and patching more bugs in firmware.

Google continues to accept reports from third-party contributors. With the launch of Android 13, Google updated its Vulnerability Rewards Program to "further highlight remotely exploitable bugs in connectivity firmware."

More details in Google's blog post.

Google Play Protect is now using a new "Protected Download" API to verify the integrity of models and heuristics downloaded onto devices, ensuring malware authors haven't tampered with them. Protected Download "enables downloading of resources to the device with support for a binary transparency log based verification", ensuring that the resources are officially from Google.

Protected Download is a new API offered by "Private Compute Services", the open source app that Android System Intelligence (part of Android's "Private Compute Core") uses to retrieve model updates from external servers. "The mechanism of download is open-sourced to show that through the connection to the server personal user data is not sent to Google, but rather receiving the model or heuristics in an encrypted and verified manner."

I haven't seen a public announcement of this yet, but it was released last week.

Magic Eraser is no longer exclusive to Pixel phones! Google One members on iOS and Android can use Magic Eraser in Google Photos starting today. It'll also be available on all Pixels now (no Google One membership needed), not just the Pixel 6 and later.

Google One members are also getting free shipping on print orders (US, CA, EU, and UK), HDR effect now works on videos too, and the collage editor now lets you apply Styles to a single photo and try a range of new Styles.

Source

Want to check if your Android device passes the Play Integrity API check? You can use Google Play's new built-in Play Integrity checker available in version 34.6.11 or later.

Here's how:

1) Open Google Play and go to Settings

2) Expand "About" and tap on "Play Store version" until you see "You are now a developer!"

3) Expand "General" and tap on "Developer options"

4) Tap on "check integrity"

H/T @nailsad_eleos

Some users are reporting that Google Play is telling them that "recent data from similar devices show that this app may stop working on your device."

This seems like a neat feature of Google Play. If an app is having a bunch of crashes and ANRs on particular device models, it would be useful to let other users of that same device model know ahead of time to perhaps wait for an update.

I haven't seen this before, so I think it could be relatively new. Correct me if this has been around for a long time and I just missed it. All the mentions of it I've found are recent, with the earliest being in October.

Screenshot credits: @Felixlix45

—-

UPDATE: It looks like this was announced in October 2022.

If you're an app developer and want to test Android 14's improved predictive back gesture animation (w/ support for cross-task & in-app transition previews) as shown in the below video, here's how 👇

You'll need a device running Android 14 DP1, of course. You'll also need root access, though, so if you don't/can't root your Pixel, then the Android Emulator will suffice as it allows for adb root.

All you have to do is run these commands in an elevated shell:

1) Enable new predictive back animations:

setprop persist.wm.debug.predictive_back_anim 1

2) Restart system_server:

stop && start

And voila! You should see the new animations. That's provided you also have "predictive back animations" enabled in Developer Options, as otherwise even the back-to-home animation is disabled. If your app targets API 33, you'll also need to opt in.

In future Android 14 previews, you probably won't have to enable this new predictive back animation using root, but I don't know if that'll happen in DP2, Beta 1, or later.

For the full details on the predictive back gesture improvements coming to Android 14, check out this article I wrote for XDA-Developers a few weeks back.

Google Keep's new single note widget is rolling out starting today on Android devices. This widget lets you pin a note or list to your home screen and toggle checkboxes directly without opening the app (!)

Google announced this new widget a few days back at MWC, but according to the Google Workspace blog, the rollout begins today and will take up to 15 days to complete.