I talked about this issue last year when Zachary Wander brought it to my attention. At the time, it seemed like it was an oversight, so developers filed a report on the Issue Tracker. Unfortunately, Android 13 released with no fix/update on the issue...

On May 2, 2023, though, Google marked the issue with "Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior)".

Their reasoning:

"We discussed the behavior with our product and engineering team and they were supportive of keeping the API only accessible to privileged system apps."

The Android API docs have been updated to reflect the new behavior. Android 14's new READ_WALLPAPER_INTERNAL permission has a protection level of signature|privileged, so it can only be granted to privileged system apps.

Google doesn't say why they require apps to request the sensitive MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission instead of something less far-reaching like READ_MEDIA_IMAGES, but there is a valid reason for limiting which apps can access your wallpaper. As this blog post points out, it's possible to create a cross-app identifier by checking the user's wallpaper. Also, many people use a personal photo as their wallpaper, which you may not want untrusted apps to have access to.

As some developers point out on the Issue Tracker, though, there are some potentially useful things that this change makes more difficult to do for third-party launchers.

(H/T to Zachary again for first spotting this change a few months back on Mastodon, and to this XDA article for reminding me of this.)

Sample app demonstrating how the Android 13 update affects getDrawable. Sample app demonstrating that MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE allows apps to retrieve the wallpaper.

The sources for SDK 34 are now available through Android Studio!

Note that this isn't the full Android 14 OS source code, so you can't build an OS image from this. But if you're a developer looking to update your app to use Android 14 APIs, this could help you during debugging.

Curiously, there are many hidden/system APIs included in this source code release, which doesn't make sense since these can't be used by third-party apps and aren't documented in the public SDK.

The Android 13 SDK sources also includes many APIs marked SystemAPI or hide, so I guess these just aren't removed. It's not like you can use them without reflection/swapping out android.jar anyway, though.

Satellite communication APIs did make their way into Android 14, though everything is marked as "hide" so they're not available to third-party apps.

There's going to be a satellite service "demo mode". Supported datagrams include SOS messages and location sharing.

Satellite support will, of course, depend on the modem hardware in the device you're using. It's not something that's going to be supported by every device running Android 14.

More details:

The SatelliteSOSMessageRecommender module monitors the cell service and IMS registration states during an emergency call and notifies the Dialer when Telephony is unable to find a network so that the Dialer can prompt the user to switch to satellite messaging.

The app that handles the "pointing UI" is defined in the framework by config_pointing_ui_package, while the app that implements the satellite service is defined by config_satellite_service_package. Both are unset on my Pixel.

The Settings.Global.SATELLITE_MODE_RADIOS string holds which radios to disable while satellite mode is on. Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi, and UWB can be toggled when satellite mode is enabled. Separately, another method determines whether to enable the cellular modem.