Tag Archives: privacy

Password manager Dashlane sees 70% increase in conversion rate for signing-in with passkeys compared to passwords

Posted by Milica Mihajlija, Technical Writer

This article was originally posted on Google for Developers

Dashlane is a password management tool that provides a secure way to manage user credentials, access control, and authentication across multiple systems and applications. Dashlane has over 18 million users and 20,000 businesses in 180 countries. It’s available on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and as a web app with an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.


The opportunity

Many users choose password managers because of the pain and frustration of dealing with passwords. While password managers help here, the fact remains that one of the biggest issues with passwords are security breaches. Passkeys on the other hand bring passwordless authentication with major advancements in security.

Passkeys are a simple and secure authentication technology that enables signing in to online accounts without entering a password. They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches of relying parties, and protect users from phishing attacks. Passkeys are built on open standards and work on all major platforms and browsers.

As an authentication tool, Dashlane’s primary goal is to ensure customers’ credentials are kept safe. They realized how significant the impact of passkeys could be to the security of their users and adapted their applications to support passkeys across devices, browsers, and platforms. With passkey support they provide users a secure and convenient access with a phishing-resistant authentication method.


Implementation

Passkeys as a replacement for passwords is a relatively new concept and to address the challenge of going from a familiar to an unfamiliar way of logging in, the Dashlane team considered various solutions.

On the desktop web they implemented conditional UI support through a browser extension to help users gracefully navigate the choice between using a password and a passkey to log into websites that support both login methods. As soon as the user taps on the username input field, an autofill suggestion dialog pops up with the stored passkeys and password autofill suggestions. The user can then choose an account and use the device screen lock to sign in.

Moving image showing continual UI experience on the web

Note: To learn how to add passkeys support with conditional UI to your web app check out Create a passkey for passwordless logins and Sign in with a passkey through form autofill.

On Android, they used the Credential Manager API which supports multiple sign-in methods, such as username and password, passkeys, and federated sign-in solutions (such as Sign-in with Google) in a single API. The Credential Manager simplifies the development process and it has enabled Dashlane to implement passkeys support on Android in 8 weeks with a team of one engineer.

Moving image showing authentication UI experience in android

Note: If you are a credential provider, such as a password manager app, check out the guide on how to integrate Credential Manager with your credential provider solution.


Results

Data shows that users are more satisfied with the passkey flows than the existing password flows.

The conversion rate is 92% on passkey authentication opportunities on the web (when Dashlane suggests a saved passkey for the user to sign in), compared to a 54% conversion rate on opportunities to automatically sign in with passwords. That’s a 70% increase in conversion rate compared to passwords–a great sign for passkey adoption.

Graph showing evolution of positive actions on passkeys, measuring the rates of authentication with a passkey and registration of a passkey over a six month period

Image showing password sign-in prompt
Password sign-in prompt.

Image showing passkey sign-in prompt
Passkey sign-in prompt.

The conversion rate here refers to user actions when they visit websites that support passkeys. If a user attempts to register or use a passkey they will see a Dashlane dialog appear on Chrome on desktop. If they proceed and create new or use an existing passkey it is considered a success. If they dismiss the dialog or cancel passkey creation, it’s considered a failure. The same user experience flow applies to passwords.

Dashlane also saw a 63% conversion rate on passkey registration opportunities (when Dashlane offers to save a newly created passkey to the user’s vault) compared to only around 25% conversion rate on suggestions to save new passwords. This indicates that Dashlane’s suggestions to save passkeys are more relevant and precise than the suggestions to save passwords.

Image showing save passkey prompt
Save passkey prompt.

Image showing save password prompt
Save password prompt.

Dashlane observed an acceleration of passkey usage with 6.8% average weekly growth of passkeys saved and used on the web.

graph showing % of Active users that performed a passkey related event, out of users having ever interacted with a passkey with a moving average on 7 days over a six month period
Save password prompt.

Takeaways

While passkeys are a new technology that users are just starting to get familiar with, the adoption rate and positive engagement rates show that Dashlane users are more satisfied with passkey flows than the existing password flows. 


“Staying up to date on developments in the market landscape and industry, anticipating the potential impact to your customers’ experience, and being ready to meet their needs can pay off. Thanks in part to our rapid implementation of the Credential Manager API, customers can rest assured that they can continue to rely on Dashlane to store and help them access services, no matter how authentication methods evolve.“ –Rew Islam, Director of Product Engineering and Innovation at Dashlane
 

Dashlane tracks and investigates all passkey errors and says that there haven’t been many. They also receive few questions from customers around how to use or manage their passkeys. This can be a sign of an intuitive user experience, clear help center documentation, a tendency of passkey users today already being knowledgeable about passkeys, or some combination of these factors.

Android 14 is live in AOSP

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Today we're releasing Android 14 and pushing the Android 14 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Android 14 is designed to improve your productivity as developers while enhancing performance, privacy, security, and customization for users.

Android 14 is rolling out to select Pixel devices starting today, and will be available later this year on some of your favorite devices from Samsung Galaxy, iQOO, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo and Xiaomi.

Thank you for taking the time to take Android 14 for an early spin though our developer preview and beta programs, sharing your feedback, and making sure your apps deliver a great experience on Android 14. Making Android work well for each and every one of the billions of Android users is a collaborative process between us, Android hardware manufacturers, and you, our developer community.

This post covers a selection of Android 14 changes that have the most developer impact. For a complete list of all of the Android 14 changes, visit the Android 14 developer site.

Performance and Efficiency

A big focus of Android 14 was on improving the performance and efficiency of the platform.

Freezing cached applications

Prior to Android 14, cached applications were allowed to run somewhat unconstrained. In Android 14, we freeze cached applications after a short period of time, giving them 0 CPU time. In Android 14 Beta populations, we see that cached processes consume up to 50% less CPU cycles as compared to Android 13 public devices. Thus, background work is disallowed outside of conventional Android app lifecycle APIs such as foreground services, JobScheduler, or WorkManager.

Optimized broadcasts

To keep frozen applications frozen longer (i.e. not get CPU time), we adjusted how apps receive context-registered broadcasts once they go into a cached state; they may be queued, and repeating ones, such as BATTERY_CHANGED, may be merged into one broadcast.

Faster app launches

With cached app and broadcast optimizations In Android 14, we were able to increase long-standing limits on the maximum number of cached applications in the platform, leading to a reduction in cold app starts that scales by the RAM present on the device. On 8GB devices, the beta group saw 20% fewer cold app starts, and on 12GB devices it was over 30% fewer. Cold startups are slow compared to warm startups and they are expensive in terms of power. This work effectively improves both power usage and overall app startup times.

Reduced memory footprint

Improving the Android Runtime (ART) has a huge impact on the Android user-experience. Code size is one of the key metrics we look at; smaller generated files are better for memory (both RAM and storage). In Android 14, ART includes optimizations that reduce code size by an average of 9.3% without impacting performance.

Customization

Customization is at the core of Android's DNA, and Android 14 continues our commitment to enabling Android users to tune their experience around their individual needs, including enhanced accessibility and internationalization features.

Bigger fonts with non-linear scaling – Starting in Android 14, users will be able to scale up their font to 200%. Previously, the maximum font size scale on Pixel devices was 130%. A non-linear font scaling curve is automatically applied to ensure that text that is already large enough doesn’t increase at the same rate as smaller text. Learn more here.

Image showing the differences between font with no scaling at 100% on the left, standard scaling at 200% in the middle, and non-linear scaling at 200% on the right

Per-app language preferences – You can dynamically update your app's localeConfig with LocaleManager.setOverrideLocaleConfig to customize the set of languages displayed in the per-app language list in Android Settings. IMEs can now use LocaleManager.getApplicationLocales to know the UI language of the current app to update the keyboard language. Starting with Android Studio Giraffe and AGP 8.1, you can configure your app to support Android 13's per-app language preferences automatically.

Regional preferences – Regional preferences enable users to personalize temperature units, the first day of the week, and numbering systems.

Grammatical Inflection – The Grammatical Inflection API allows you to more easily add support for users who speak languages that have grammatical gender. To show personalized translations, you just need to add translations inflected for each grammatical gender for impacted languages and integrate the API.

New media capabilities


Ultra HDR for images - Android 14 adds support for 10-bit high dynamic range (HDR) images, with support for the Ultra HDR image format. The format is fully backward-compatible with JPEG, allowing apps to seamlessly interoperate with HDR images.

Zoom, Focus, Postview, and more in Camera Extensions - Android 14 upgrades and improves Camera Extensions, allowing apps to handle longer processing times, enabling improved images using compute-intensive algorithms like low-light photography on supported devices.

Lossless USB audio - Android 14 devices can support lossless audio formats for audiophile-level experiences over USB wired headsets.

New graphics capabilities

Custom meshes with vertex and fragment shaders - Android 14 adds support for custom meshes, which can be defined as triangles or triangle strips, and can, optionally, be indexed. These meshes are specified with custom attributes, vertex strides, varying, and vertex/fragment shaders written in AGSL.

Hardware buffer renderer for Canvas - Android 14 introduces HardwareBufferRenderer to assist in using Android's Canvas API to draw with hardware acceleration into a HardwareBuffer, which is particularly helpful when your use case involves communication with the system compositor through SurfaceControl for low-latency drawing.

Developing across form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors including a taskbar supporting enhanced multitasking, large-screen optimized system apps and notification UI, activity embedding, enhanced letterboxing, improved media projection, and more. Our app quality guidance for large screens along with additional learning opportunities around building for large screens and foldables can help optimize your app across all Android surfaces, while the large screen gallery contains design patterns and inspiration for social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading apps.

Improving your productivity

Android 14 contains many updates focused on making your development experience more consistent, fun, and productive. Many of these updates are being made available on older platform releases using a combination of Google Play system updates, Jetpack libraries, and Google Play services, so you can reach more users with them.

OpenJDK 17 Support - Thanks to Google Play system updates (Project Mainline), over 600M devices are enabled to receive the latest Android Runtime (ART) updates that ship with Android 14. Learn more here.

Credential Manager and Passkeys support - Credential Manager is a new Jetpack API that supports multiple sign-in methods, such as username and password, passkeys, and federated sign-in solutions (such as Sign-in with Google) in a single API, simplifying your integration. Using Google Play services, Credential Manager is supported back to Android 4.4 (API level 19). Read more here.

Health Connect - Health Connect is a user controlled on-device repository for user health and fitness data that makes it easier than ever to support an integrated health and fitness experience across apps and connected devices. Health Connect is part of the Android platform and receives updates via Google Play system updates without requiring a separate download, and is available to older devices as an app on the Google Play store. Read about Health Connect and more in What's new in Android Health.

Superior system sharesheets - To make it easy to give your app's users a rich, consistent, sharing experience, the system sharesheets in Android 14 are configurable with custom actions and improved ranking.

More consistent and reliable foreground services- We've collaborated with hardware manufacturers such as Samsung to create both a more consistent developer experience and a more reliable user experience. To this end, Android 14 has a new requirement to declare foreground service types and request type-specific permissions and we have Google Play policies to enforce appropriate use of these APIs. We've also added a new user-initiated data transfer job type, making the experience of managing large user-initiated uploads and downloads smoother by leveraging JobScheduler's constraints (e.g. network constraints such as unmetered WiFi).

User experience

Predictive Back - Android 14 introduces new Predictive Back system animations – cross-activity and cross-task – to join the back-to-home animation introduced in Android 13. The system animations remain behind a developer option to allow time for additional polish and for more apps to opt-into Predictive Back; Material and Jetpack Predictive Back animations are available to users today.

Privacy and security

 
Data sharing updates – Users will see a new section in the location runtime permission dialog that highlights when an app shares location data with third parties, where they can get more information and control the app’s data access.

Partial access to photos and videos – When your app targeting SDK 34 requests any of the visual media permissions introduced in SDK 33 (READ_MEDIA_IMAGES / READ_MEDIA_VIDEO), Android 14 users can now grant your app access to only selected photos and videos. To adapt your app to this change, we recommend following our recent best practices.

Background activity launching – Android 10 (API level 29) and higher place restrictions on when apps can start activities when running in the background. To further reduce instances of unexpected interruptions, apps targeting Android 14 need to grant privileges to start activities in the background when sending a PendingIntent or when binding a service.

Block installation of apps targeting older SDK versions – To protect against malware that targets older API levels to bypass security and privacy protections, apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 cannot be installed on Android 14.

Runtime receivers – Apps targeting Android 14 must indicate if dynamic Context.registerReceiver() usage should be treated as "exported" or "unexported", a continuation of the manifest-level work from previous releases. Learn more here.

Secure full screen Intent notifications – Since full-screen intent notifications are designed for extremely high-priority notifications demanding the user's immediate attention, Android 14 limits the apps granted this permission on app install to those that provide calling and alarms only. Your app can now launch the settings page where users can grant the permission.

Safer dynamic code loading – Apps targeting Android 14 require dynamically loaded files to be marked as read-only. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents – For apps targeting Android 14, creating a mutable pending intent with an implicit intent will throw an exception, preventing them from being able to be used to trigger unexpected code paths. Apps need to either make the pending intent immutable or make the intent explicit. Learn more here.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in until your app targets SDK version 34 to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

Easier testing and debugging of changes – To make it easier for you to test the opt-in changes that can affect your app, we’ll make many of them toggleable again this year. With the toggles, you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. Check out the details here.

image of app compatibility toggles in Developer Options
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Get your apps, libraries, tools, and game engines ready!

Now is the time to finish your final compatibility testing and publish any necessary updates to ensure a smooth app experience.

If you develop an SDK, library, tool, or game engine, it's even more important to release any necessary updates now to prevent your downstream app and game developers from being blocked by compatibility issues and allow them to target the latest SDK features. Please make sure to let your developers know if updates are needed to fully support Android 14.

Testing your app involves installing your production app onto a device running Android 14; you can use Google Play or other means. Work through all the app's flows and look for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. Each release of Android contains changes to the platform that improve privacy, security, and the overall user experience, and these changes can affect your apps. Here are some top changes to test:

Remember to exercise libraries and SDKs that your app is using in your compatibility testing. You may need to update to current SDK versions or reach out to the developer for help.

Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes that apply when your app targets Android 14 and use the compatibility framework to help detect issues quickly.

Get started with Android 14

If you have a supported Pixel device, and are not enrolled in the Android Beta program, you will receive the public Android 14 OTA update as it becomes available (it may take a week or longer as this is a phased rollout dependent on device type and carrier). If you are currently enrolled in the Android Beta program running Android 14, you likely have received and installed the beta of the next Android 14 quarterly platform release (QPR1).

System images for Pixel devices are available here for manual download and flash, and you can get the latest 64-bit Android Emulator system images via the Android Studio SDK Manager. If you're looking for the Android 14 source, you'll find it here in the Android Open Source Project repository under the Android 14 branches.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest release of Android Studio Hedgehog. Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility – learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14. Install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes – Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.
  • Update your app with the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant – Android Studio Hedgehog now filters and identifies the specific Android 14 API changes that are relevant to your app, and walks you through the steps to upgrade your targetSdkVersion with the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant.
Screengrab of Android SDK Upgrade Assistant on Google Pixel Fold

Thank you again for participating in our Android developer preview and beta program! We're looking forward to seeing how your apps take advantage of the updates in Android 14.

Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Privacy Sandbox Developer Preview 9: Custom Audience Delegation

Posted by Jon Markoff, Privacy Sandbox Developer Relations

Earlier this year we released the first Privacy Sandbox Beta on Android, with the goal of bringing real-world testing of our private advertising solutions to users' devices.

Since then, we’ve launched several additional Privacy Sandbox releases, each with new features and improvements, in Developer Preview and Beta. This is part of our ongoing commitment to helping developers create privacy-focused apps and tools that keep content open and accessible to everyone. Your feedback has helped us refine and improve these releases and new design proposals, and is greatly appreciated.

Today, we’re announcing Developer Preview 9 for the Privacy Sandbox on Android, including:

  • Protected Audience API: The first release of Custom Audience Delegation, which supports the creation of custom audiences for buyers that do not have an on-device SDK presence. Bidding and Auction services integrations are available to support more complex ad auctions.
  • Attribution Reporting API: Enrollment is no longer required for development and testing purposes. Improvements to debug reporting include supporting additional verbose debug report and app-to-web debug reports.
  • SDK Runtime: With some limitations, SDK Runtime can now launch intents to other apps, and can bind to an allowlist of services.
  • For the full list of released features, see the release notes.

Alongside Developer Preview 9, we’re also announcing Project Flight: a collection of sample apps that demonstrate how the Privacy Sandbox APIs can be used together in end-to-end user journeys. Project Flight includes the following:

  • Advertiser app, to demonstrate a conversion by booking a travel experience
  • Publisher app, to show a relevant ad and register an event
  • SSP library, to demonstrate running ad selection and registering a source
  • MMP library, to demonstrate joining a custom audience and registering a trigger
  • A mock server backend as a companion to the Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting APIs using Firebase

As with all of our releases, we highly encourage developers to share feedback as they continue their journey into the Privacy Sandbox on Android. To get started, read the instructions to set up the SDK and system images on an emulator or supported Pixel device.

For more information on the Privacy Sandbox on Android, visit the developer site, and sign up for our newsletter to receive regular updates.

Expanding our Fully Homomorphic Encryption offering

Posted by Miguel Guevara, Product Manager, Privacy and Data Protection Office

At Google, it’s our responsibility to keep users safe online and ensure they’re able to enjoy the products and services they love while knowing their personal information is private and secure. We’re able to do more with less data through the development of our privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like differential privacy and federated learning.

And throughout the global tech industry, we’re excited to see that adoption of PETs is on the rise. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published guidance for how organizations including local governments can start using PETs to aid with data minimization and compliance with data protection laws. Consulting firm Gartner predicts that within the next two years, 60% of all large organizations will be deploying PETs in some capacity.

We’re on the cusp of mainstream adoption of PETs, which is why we also believe it’s our responsibility to share new breakthroughs and applications from our longstanding development and investment in this space. By open sourcing dozens of our PETs over the past few years, we’ve made them freely available for anyone – developers, researchers, governments, business and more – to use in their own work, helping unlock the power of data sets without revealing personal information about users.

As part of this commitment, we open-sourced a first-of-its-kind Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) transpiler two years ago, and have continued to remove barriers to entry along the way. FHE is a powerful technology that allows you to perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access sensitive or personal information and we’re excited to share our latest developments that were born out of collaboration with our developer and research community to expand what can be done with FHE.

Furthering the adoption of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Today, we are introducing additional tools to help the community apply FHE technologies to video files. This advancement is important because video adoption can often be expensive and incur long run times, limiting the ability to scale FHE use to larger files and new formats.

This will encourage developers to try out more complex applications with FHE. Historically, FHE has been thought of as an intractable technology for large-scale applications. Our results processing large video files show it is possible to do FHE in previously unimaginable domains.Say you’re a developer at a company and are thinking of processing a large file (in the TBs order of magnitude, can be a video, or a sequence of characters) for a given task (e.g., convolution around specific data points to do a blurry filter on a video or detect object movement), you can now try this task using FHE.

To do so, we are expanding our FHE toolkit in three new ways to make it easier for developers to use FHE for a wider range of applications, such as private machine learning, text analysis, and video processing. As part of our toolkit, we will release new hardware, a software crypto library and an open source compiler toolchain. Our goal is to provide these new tools to researchers and developers to help advance how FHE is used to protect privacy while simultaneously lowering costs.


Expanding our toolkit

We believe—with more optimization and specialty hardware — there will be a wider amount of use cases for a myriad of similar private machine learning tasks, like privately analyzing more complex files, such as long videos, or processing text documents. Which is why we are releasing a TensorFlow-to-FHE compiler that will allow any developer to compile their trained TensorFlow Machine Learning models into a FHE version of those models.

Once a model has been compiled to FHE, developers can use it to run inference on encrypted user data without having access to the content of the user inputs or the inference results. For instance, our toolchain can be used to compile a TensorFlow Lite model to FHE, producing a private inference in 16 seconds for a 3-layer neural network. This is just one way we are helping researchers analyze large datasets without revealing personal information.

In addition, we are releasing Jaxite, a software library for cryptography that allows developers to run FHE on a variety of hardware accelerators. Jaxite is built on top of JAX, a high-performance cross-platform machine learning library, which allows Jaxite to run FHE programs on graphics processing units (GPUs) and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Google originally developed JAX for accelerating neural network computations, and we have discovered that it can also be used to speed up FHE computations.

Finally, we are announcing Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation (HEIR), an open-source compiler toolchain for homomorphic encryption. HEIR is designed to enable interoperability of FHE programs across FHE schemes, compilers, and hardware accelerators. Built on top of MLIR, HEIR aims to lower the barriers to privacy engineering and research. We will be working on HEIR with a variety of industry and academic partners, and we hope it will be a hub for researchers and engineers to try new optimizations, compare benchmarks, and avoid rebuilding boilerplate. We encourage anyone interested in FHE compiler development to come to our regular meetings, which can be found on the HEIR website.

Launch diagram

Building advanced privacy technologies and sharing them with others

Organizations and governments around the world continue to explore how to use PETs to tackle societal challenges and help developers and researchers securely process and protect user data and privacy. At Google, we’re continuing to improve and apply these novel data processing techniques across many of our products, and investing in democratizing access to the PETs we’ve developed. We believe that every internet user deserves world-class privacy, and we continue to partner with others to further that goal. We’re excited for new testing and partnerships on our open source PETs and will continue investing in innovations, aiming at releasing more updates in the future.

These principles are the foundation for everything we make at Google and we’re proud to be an industry leader in developing and scaling new privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that make it possible to create helpful experiences while protecting our users’ privacy.

PETs are a key part of our Protected Computing effort at Google, which is a growing toolkit of technologies that transforms how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety. And keeping users safe online shouldn’t stop with Google - it should extend to the whole of the internet. That’s why we continue to innovate privacy technologies and make them widely available to all.

Giving Users More Transparency and Control Over Account Data

Posted by Bethel Otuteye, Senior Director, Product Management, Android App Safety

Google Play has launched a number of recent initiatives to help developers build consumer trust by showcasing their apps' privacy and security practices in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Today, we’re building on this work with a new data deletion policy that aims to empower users with greater clarity and control over their in-app data.

For apps that enable app account creation, developers will soon need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online. This web requirement, which you will link in your Data safety form, is especially important so that a user can request account and data deletion without having to reinstall an app.

While Play’s Data safety section already lets developers highlight their data deletion options, we know that users want an easier and more consistent way to request them. By creating a more intuitive experience with this policy, we hope to better educate our shared users on the data controls available to them and create greater trust in your apps and in Google Play more broadly.

As the new policy states, when you fulfill a request to delete an account, you must also delete the data associated with that account. The feature also gives developers a way to provide more choice: users who may not want to delete their account entirely can choose to delete other data only where applicable (such as activity history, images, or videos). For developers that need to retain certain data for legitimate reasons such as security, fraud prevention, or regulatory compliance, you must clearly disclose those data retention practices.

Moving image of a accessing account deletion from a mobile device.
Note: Images are examples and subject to change

While we’re excited about the greater control this will give people over their data, we understand it will take time for developers to prepare, especially those without an existing deletion functionality or web presence, which is why we’re sharing information and resources today.

As a first step, we’re asking developers to submit answers to new Data deletion questions in your app’s Data Safety form by December 7. Early next year, Google Play users will begin to see reflected changes in your app’s store listing, including the refreshed data deletion badge in the Data safety section and the new Data deletion area.

Developers who need more time can file for an extension in Play Console until May 31, 2024 to comply with the new policy.

For more information on data deletion and other policy changes announced today:

As always, thank you for your continued partnership in making Google Play a safe and trustworthy platform for everyone.

Privacy Week for Android Developers

Posted by Marcel Pinto , Developer Relations Engineer, Android

Android is secure by default and private by design. The platform is focused on bringing the best experiences and latest innovations to users, while keeping them safe by protecting their security and privacy.

But that’s not enough. As Android developers, we have a unique opportunity to shape the privacy landscape for millions of users. With the increasing importance of data privacy, it's crucial for developers to understand the best practices for protecting user information in their apps while providing a great user experience.

During the Privacy Week for Android Developers, we will focus on the steps that you, the developer, can take to ensure that your apps are secure and privacy-conscious. From coding techniques to data storage and management, we'll explore the essential elements of Android privacy that every developer should know. We’ll also highlight several upcoming changes in Android 14.

What to expect this week?

  • Daily new content with guides, tips, and news
  • Guidance regarding the principles of permissions and how to minimize data and location access
  • Updates about Android 14’s privacy-related changes
  • …and more!

Where?

Let’s start?

First, start by bookmarking the new Design For Safety landing page. This redesigned hub will help you navigate through all the changes and quickly find guides, best practices, and policy updates.

design for safety hub screenshot. The section about the Android changes timeline appears in the screenshot.In addition, to make it easier for developers to follow privacy principles, we have created a cheat-sheet for you:
Privacy cheat-sheet for Android Developers
Click to enlarge

For those who like a more hands-on experience, we recently published a new codelab that covers the major privacy topics and how your app can adapt them.

Android Privacy Codelab screenshot showing the steps and the intro page

And last but not least, don’t forget to check our video resources:

With special highlight to:

Stay tuned, there is more to come this week!

Android 14 Developer Preview 2

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

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.

Working across form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. See get started with building for large screens and learn about foldables for a quick jumpstart on how to get your apps ready. Our app quality guidance for large screens contains detailed checklists to review your app. We've also recently released libraries supporting low latency stylus and motion prediction.

The large screen gallery contains design inspiration for social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading app experiences.

Privacy and security

Privacy and security have always been a core part of Android's mission, built on the foundation of app sandboxing, open source code, and open app development. In Android 14, we’re building the highest quality platform for all by providing a safer device environment and giving users more controls to protect their information.

Selected photos access

We recommend that you use the Photo Picker if your app needs to access media that the user selects; it provides a permissionless experience on devices running Android 4.4 onwards, using a combination of core platform features, Google Play system updates, and Google Play services.

If you cannot use Photo Picker, when your app requests any of the visual media permissions (READ_MEDIA_IMAGES / READ_MEDIA_VIDEO) introduced in SDK 33, Android 14 users can now grant your app access to only selected photos and videos.

In the new dialog, the permission choices will be:

  • Allow access to all photos: the full library of all on-device photos & videos is available
  • Select photos: only the user's selection of photos & videos will be temporarily available via MediaStore
  • Don’t allow: access to all photos and videos is denied

Apps can prompt users to select media again by requesting the media permissions again and having the READ_MEDIA_VISUAL_USER_SELECTED permission declared in their app manifest.

Please test this new behavior with your apps and adapt your UX to handle the new permission and the media file reselection flow.

Credential manager

Android 14 adds Credential Manager as a platform API, and we're supporting it back to Android 4.4 (API level 19) devices through a Jetpack Library with a Google Play services implementation. It aims to make sign-in easier for users with APIs that retrieve and store credentials with user-configured credential providers. In addition to supporting passwords, the API allows your app to sign-in using passkeys, the new industry standard for passwordless sign-in. Passkeys are built on industry standards, can work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used with both websites and apps. Developer Preview 2 features improvements in the UI styling for the account selector, along with changes to the API based upon feedback from Developer Preview 1. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents

For apps targeting Android 14, creating a mutable pending intent with an implicit intent will throw an exception, preventing them from being able to be used to trigger unexpected code paths. Apps need to either make the pending intent immutable or make the intent explicit. Learn more here.

Background activity launching

Android 10 (API level 29) and higher place restrictions on when apps can start activities when the app is running in the background. These restrictions help minimize interruptions for the user and keep them more in control of what's shown on their screen. To further reduce instances of unexpected interruptions, Android 14 gives foreground apps more control over the ability of apps they interact with to start activities. Specifically, apps targeting Android 14 need to grant privileges to start activities in the background when sending a PendingIntent or when binding a Service.

Streamlining background work

Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.

Background optimizations

Developer Preview 2 includes optimizations to Android’s memory management system to improve resource usage while applications are 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.

Fewer non-dismissible notifications

Notifications on Android 14 containing FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT will be user dismissible on unlocked handheld devices. Notifications will stay non-dismissible when the device is locked, and notification listeners will not be able to dismiss these notifications. Notifications that are important to device functionality, like system and device policy notifications, will remain fully non-dismissible.

Improved App Store Experiences

Android 14 introduces several new PackageInstaller APIs which allow app stores to improve their user experience, including the requestUserPreapproval() method that allows the download of APKs to be deferred until after the installation has been approved, the setRequestUpdateOwnership() method that allows an installer to indicate that it is responsible for future updates to an app it is installing, and the setDontKillApp() method that can seamlessly install optional features of an app through split APKs while the app is in use. Also, the InstallConstraints API gives installers a way to ensure that app updates happen at an opportune moment, such as when an app is no longer in use.

If you develop an app store, please give these APIs a try and let us know what you think!

Personalization

Regional Preferences

Regional preferences enable users to personalize temperature units, the first day of the week, and numbering systems. A European living in the United States might prefer temperature units to be in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and for apps to treat Monday as the beginning of the week instead of the US default of Sunday.

New Android Settings menus for these preferences provide users with a discoverable and centralized location to change app preferences. These preferences also persist through backup and restore. Several APIs and intents grant you read access to user preferences for adjusting app information display (getTemperatureUnit, getFirstDayOfWeek). You can also register a BroadcastReceiver on ACTION_LOCALE_CHANGED to handle locale configuration changes when regional preferences change.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

Developer Preview 2 is in the period where we're looking for input on our APIs, along with details on how platform changes affect your apps, so now is the time to try new features and give us your feedback.

It’s also a good time to start your compatibility testing and identify any work you’ll need to do. You can test some of them without changing your app's targetSdkVersion using the behavior change toggles in Developer Options. This will help you get a preliminary idea of how your app might be affected by opt-in changes in Android 14.

Image of a partial screen shot of a device showing App compatibility toggles in Developer Options
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Platform Stability is when we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2023, and from that time you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 14

The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. For phones, you can get started today by flashing a system image onto a Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, or Pixel 4a (5G) device. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so it will only available by manual download for new Android 14 developer preview users. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.

If you intend to move from the Android 13 QPR Beta program to the Android 14 Developer Preview program and don't want to have to wipe your device, we recommend that you move to Developer Preview 2 now. Otherwise, you may run into time periods where the Android 13 Beta will have a more recent build date which will prevent you from going directly to the Android 14 Developer Preview without doing a data wipe.

As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android 14 Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.

For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.

Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Keeping Android and Google Play safe with our key 2023 initiatives

Posted by Bethel Otuteye, Senior Director, Product Management, Android App Safety

It’s our top priority to keep Android and Google Play safe for developers to build successful businesses and provide quality apps and games to billions of users around the world. Over the past years, we’ve continued to share more tools to help protect your apps, evolve our policies to help keep people and their families safe and secure, and collaborate with you to build more private advertising technology.

We know it can be difficult to keep up with how quickly the privacy and security landscape evolves. So, we’ve been sharing more product and policy support, frequent updates about our work, and advance notice about changes. As we did last year, we’re sharing a preview of some of our key priorities that we’re excited to collaborate with you on, on the behalf of our shared users.

What we look forward to this year

Building a more privacy-friendly approach to advertising

Last year, we announced the Privacy Sandbox on Android, an industry-wide initiative to raise the bar for user privacy and ensure continued access to free content and services. Building on our web efforts, we’re developing solutions for digital advertising that limit user data sharing and don't rely on cross-app identifiers. We’re working closely with the industry to gather feedback and test these new technologies.

Now, we’re entering the next phase of this initiative: Rolling out the first Beta for the Privacy Sandbox on Android to a small percentage of Android devices. With the Beta, users and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these new solutions in the real world. See our developer guidance on how to participate in the Beta and follow our Privacy Sandbox blog for regular updates. We’ll continue to work in collaboration with developers, publishers, regulators and more as we navigate the transition to a more private mobile ecosystem.

Giving people more control over their data

Developers want to build consumer trust by showcasing responsible data practices in a way that’s simple and easy to understand. Over the past few years, we’ve helped developers provide more transparency around if and how they collect, share, and protect user data. This year, we’ll continue improving Google Play’s Data safety section with new features and policies that aim to give people more clarity and control around deletion practices.

You can also enhance your users’ safety by reducing the permissions you request for accessing users’ data. Your app can often leverage privacy-preserving methods for fulfilling its use case. For example, you can use the photo picker intent to allow users to select individual photos to share with your app rather than requesting access to all the photos on their device through runtime permissions. You can also start testing privacy, security, and transparency enhancements in our Android 14 Developer Preview 1. Stay tuned to our Android 14 and Google Play policy updates, as we’ll share more soon.

Protecting your apps from abuse and attacks

Developers have told us that they want more help protecting their business, users, and IP. So, we’ve continued enhancing Play Integrity API and automated integrity protection to help you better detect and prevent risks, and strengthen your anti-abuse strategy. Developers who use these products have seen an average of over 50% reduction in unauthorized access of their apps and games. Get started today with the Play Integrity API. And, stay tuned for some highly-requested feature updates to integrity products and expanded access to automatic integrity protection.

Helping you navigate SDKs

Developers have shared that they want more help deciding which SDKs are reliable and safe to use. So, we’ve created ways for SDK providers to directly message you through Play Console and Android Studio about critical issues for specific SDK versions and how to fix SDK-related crashes. We’ve also launched Google Play SDK Index to give you insights and usage data for over 100 of the most popular commercial SDKs on Google Play. Soon, we’ll share even more information about sensitive permissions an SDK may use and whether specific SDK versions may violate Google Play policy. By partnering with SDK providers to build safer SDKs and giving you greater insight, we hope to help you and your users avoid disruptions and exposure to risks.

Enhancing protections for kids and families

We’re proud that together with developers, we have made Google Play a trusted destination for families to find educational and delightful experiences for kids. Over the past years, we’ve launched new features, expanded our programs, and evolved our policies to improve app experience and strengthen privacy and security protections. This year, you’ll continue to see improved ways for Google Play to help families discover great apps and more policy updates to protect kids’ safety. Stay updated through our policy email updates and PolicyBytes videos.

Boosting responsible data collection and use

We continue to emphasize that developers and apps should only collect and use data that’s required for their apps to function and provide quality user experiences. This year, you’ll continue to see new permission and policy requirements. Stay updated through our policy email updates and PolicyBytes videos.
 
Fostering developer innovation, while keeping users safe

As a platform, we’re always looking to understand the challenges developers face and help them bring innovative ideas to life. While Google Play already hosts a variety of blockchain related apps, we’ve increasingly heard from developers who want to introduce additional web3 components, including the tokenization of digital assets as NFTs, into their apps and games. With any new technology, we must balance innovation with our responsibility to protect users, which is why we’ve begun conversations with developer partners to assess how potential policy changes could responsibly support these opportunities. As always, engaging with developers is an essential part of how we evolve our platform and maintain a safe, transparent, and trusted experience for our shared users. We hope to have more to share in the coming months.
 
Giving you a better experience with our policies and Console

We’re continuously improving our policy communication, support, and experience. We’ve recently introduced a new Play Console feature to give you more flexibility and control over the app review process. This year, we’ll provide even more features and support.

Developers have shared that they want a place to ask questions and hear from others. So in February, we opened up the Google Play Developer Community to all developers in English so you can ask for advice and share best practices with fellow developer experts. Developers have shared positive feedback about this new forum, and we welcome you to sign up to be a Product Expert (select Play Console as your product and English as your language).

We’re also expanding our pilot programs like the Google Play Developer Helpline pilot, which provides direct policy phone support. Today, we’ve expanded the pilot to nearly 60,000 in 26 countries (16,000 more developers and 9 more countries since November). We’ve completed nearly 5,000 policy support sessions with developers and with a satisfaction score of 90%.

And last, we’ve also been sending you more notices and reminders about upcoming requirements to your Developer Console Inbox, so we reach you when you’re thinking about updating your app. This year, we’re also building a new feature to help you plan ahead about declarations.

We’ll continue to share updates with you throughout the year. Thank you for your partnership in keeping Android and Google Play safe and trustworthy for everyone.

The first developer preview of Android 14

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Making Android work well for each and every one of the billions of Android users is a collaborative process between us, Android hardware manufacturers, and you, our developer community.

Illustration of badge style Android 14 logo

Today we're releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 14, and your feedback in these previews is a critical part of making Android better for everyone. Android 14 continues our work to improve your productivity as developers, along with enhancements to performance, privacy, security, and user customization. This preview is just the beginning, and we’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release cycle.

Android continues to deliver enhancements and new features year-round, and your Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program feedback 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.

Working across devices and form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. To help you build apps that adapt to different screen sizes, we've created window size classes, sliding pane layout, Activity embedding, and box with constraints and more, all supported in Jetpack Compose. With every release, our goal is to make it easier for you to optimize your app across all Android surfaces.

To help streamline getting your apps ready we have updated our app quality guidance for large screens, and provided additional learning opportunities around building for large screens and foldables. The large screen gallery contains proven design patterns along with design inspiration around the markets that your app supports such as social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading apps.

Multi-device experiences are a big part of the future of Android. You can get started today with the Cross device SDK preview, allowing you to build rich experiences that intuitively work across different devices and form factors, and there's more to come.

Streamlining background work

Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.

Updates and additions to JobScheduler and Foreground Services

It's more complicated than necessary to perform some background work, such as downloading large files when WiFi is available. We're creating a standard path for this work to simplify your app development and potentially improve the user experience. We're also being 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.

In Android 14, we are making changes to existing Android APIs (Foreground Services and JobScheduler) including adding new functionality for user-initiated data transfers, along with an updated requirement to declare foreground service types. The user-initiated data transfer job will make managing user initiated downloads and uploads easier, particularly when they require constraints such as downloading on Wi-Fi only. The requirement to declare foreground service types allows you to clearly define the intent of the background work of your app while making it clear which use-cases are appropriate for foreground services. In addition, Google Play will be rolling out new policies to ensure the appropriate use of these APIs, with more details coming soon.

Optimized broadcasts

We’ve made several optimizations to the internal broadcast system to improve battery life and responsiveness. While most of the optimizations are internal to Android and should not impact your apps, we have adjusted how apps receive context-registered broadcasts once the app goes into a cached state. Broadcasts to context-registered receivers may be queued and only delivered to the app once it comes out of the cached state. Furthermore, some repeating context-registered broadcasts, such as BATTERY_CHANGED, may be merged into one final broadcast before it is delivered once the app comes out of the cached state.

Exact alarms

The invocation of exact alarms can significantly affect the device's resources, such as battery life. So in Android 14, newly installed apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that are not clocks or calendars must request the user to grant them the SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM special permission before setting exact alarms. Apps can direct users to the settings page via an intent to toggle this permission, but we encourage you to evaluate your use cases and choose more flexibly scheduled alternatives when possible.

Clock and calendar apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that rely on exact alarms as part of their core app workflow will be able to declare the USE_EXACT_ALARM normal permission instead (granted on install). Apps will not be able to publish a version of their app to the Play store with this permission in the manifest unless they qualify based on the policy language.

Customization

We're continuing to make sure that Android users can tune their experience around their individual needs, including enhanced accessibility and internationalization features.

Bigger fonts with non-linear scaling

Starting in Android 14, users will be able to scale up their font to 200%. Previously, the maximum font size scale on Pixel devices was 130%.

To mitigate issues where text gets too large, starting in Android 14, a non-linear font scaling curve is automatically applied. This ensures that text that is already large enough doesn’t increase at the same rate as smaller text.
Examples of text scaling showing the differences between the sizing of standard font at 100% (no scaling)on the left, standard scaling (200%) in the middle, and non-linear scaling (200%)on the rightIn Android 14, you should test your app UI with the maximum font size using the Font size option within the Accessibility > Display size and text settings. Ensure that the adjusted large text size setting is reflected in the UI, and that it doesn’t cause text to be cut off. Our documentation has more on best practices.

Per-app language preferences

You can dynamically update your app's localeConfig with LocaleManager.setOverrideLocaleConfig to customize the set of languages displayed in the per-app language list in Android Settings. This allows you to customize the language list per region, run A/B experiments, and provide updated locales if your app utilizes server-side localization pushes.

IMEs can now use LocaleManager.getApplicationLocales to know the UI language of the current app to update the keyboard language.

Grammatical Inflection API

The Grammatical Infection API allows you to more easily add support for users who speak languages which have grammatical gender. For example,

Masculine: “Vous êtes abonné à...”

Feminine: “Vous êtes abonnée à…”

Neutral: “Abonnement à…activé”

Grammatical gender is inherent to the language and cannot be easily worked around in some non-English languages. This new API lowers the effort to support viewer gender (who’s viewing the UI; not who’s being talked about) as compared to using the SelectFormat in ICU which must be applied on a per string basis.

To show personalized translations, you just need to add translations inflected for each grammatical gender for impacted languages and integrate the API.

Privacy and Security

Runtime receivers

Apps targeting Android 14 must indicate if dynamic Context.registerReceiver() usage should be treated as "exported" or "unexported", a continuation of the manifest-level work from previous releases. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents

To prevent malicious apps from intercepting intents, apps targeting Android 14 are restricted from sending intents internally that don't specify a package. Learn more here.

Safer dynamic code loading

Dynamic code loading (DCL) introduces outlets for malware and exploits, since dynamically downloaded executables can be unexpectedly manipulated, causing code injection. Apps targeting Android 14 require dynamically loaded files to be marked as read-only. Learn more here.

Block installation of apps

Malware often targets older API levels to bypass security and privacy protections that have been introduced in newer Android versions. To protect against this, starting with Android 14, apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 cannot be installed. This specific version was chosen because some malware apps use a targetSdkVersion of 22 to avoid being subjected to the runtime permission model introduced in 2015 by Android 6.0 (API level 23).

On devices that upgrade to Android 14, any apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 will remain installed.

You can test apps targeting an older API level using the following ADB command: 

adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block FILENAME.apk

Credential Manager and Passkeys support

We recently announced the alpha release of Credential Manager, a new Jetpack API that allows you to simplify your users' authentication journey, while also increasing security with support of passkeys. Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors and more convenient for users (they require just a biometric swipe to securely sign in on any device). Read more here.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

OpenJDK 17 Support - This preview includes access to 300 OpenJDK 17 classes. We are working hard to fully enable Java 17 language features in upcoming developer previews. These include record classes, multi-line strings and pattern matching instanceof. Thanks to Google Play system updates (Project Mainline), over 600M devices are enabled to receive the latest Android Runtime (ART) updates that include these changes. This is part of our commitment to give apps a more consistent, secure environment across devices, and to deliver new features and capabilities to users independent of platform releases.

Easier testing and debugging of changes - To make it easier for you to test the opt-in changes that can affect your app, we’ll make many of them toggleable again this year. With the toggles, you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. Check out the details here.
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options
Platform stability milestone - Like last year, we’re letting you know our Platform Stability milestone well in advance, to give you more time to plan for app compatibility work. At this milestone we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and also final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2023, and from that time you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 14

The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. For phones, you can get started today by flashing a system image onto a Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, or Pixel 4a (5G) device. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This initial preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so we're making it available by manual download only. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.

If you intend to move from the Android 13 QPR Beta program to the Android 14 Developer Preview program and don't want to have to wipe your device, we recommend that you move to Developer Preview 1 now. Otherwise you may run into time periods where the Android 13 Beta will have a more recent build date which will prevent you from going directly to the Android 14 Developer Preview without doing a data wipe.

As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.

For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.

Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

The first developer preview of Android 14

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Making Android work well for each and every one of the billions of Android users is a collaborative process between us, Android hardware manufacturers, and you, our developer community.

Illustration of badge style Android 14 logo

Today we're releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 14, and your feedback in these previews is a critical part of making Android better for everyone. Android 14 continues our work to improve your productivity as developers, along with enhancements to performance, privacy, security, and user customization. This preview is just the beginning, and we’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release cycle.

Android continues to deliver enhancements and new features year-round, and your Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program feedback 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.

Working across devices and form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. To help you build apps that adapt to different screen sizes, we've created window size classes, sliding pane layout, Activity embedding, and box with constraints and more, all supported in Jetpack Compose. With every release, our goal is to make it easier for you to optimize your app across all Android surfaces.

To help streamline getting your apps ready we have updated our app quality guidance for large screens, and provided additional learning opportunities around building for large screens and foldables. The large screen gallery contains proven design patterns along with design inspiration around the markets that your app supports such as social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading apps.

Multi-device experiences are a big part of the future of Android. You can get started today with the Cross device SDK preview, allowing you to build rich experiences that intuitively work across different devices and form factors, and there's more to come.

Streamlining background work

Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.

Updates and additions to JobScheduler and Foreground Services

It's more complicated than necessary to perform some background work, such as downloading large files when WiFi is available. We're creating a standard path for this work to simplify your app development and potentially improve the user experience. We're also being 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.

In Android 14, we are making changes to existing Android APIs (Foreground Services and JobScheduler) including adding new functionality for user-initiated data transfers, along with an updated requirement to declare foreground service types. The user-initiated data transfer job will make managing user initiated downloads and uploads easier, particularly when they require constraints such as downloading on Wi-Fi only. The requirement to declare foreground service types allows you to clearly define the intent of the background work of your app while making it clear which use-cases are appropriate for foreground services. In addition, Google Play will be rolling out new policies to ensure the appropriate use of these APIs, with more details coming soon.

Optimized broadcasts

We’ve made several optimizations to the internal broadcast system to improve battery life and responsiveness. While most of the optimizations are internal to Android and should not impact your apps, we have adjusted how apps receive context-registered broadcasts once the app goes into a cached state. Broadcasts to context-registered receivers may be queued and only delivered to the app once it comes out of the cached state. Furthermore, some repeating context-registered broadcasts, such as BATTERY_CHANGED, may be merged into one final broadcast before it is delivered once the app comes out of the cached state.

Exact alarms

The invocation of exact alarms can significantly affect the device's resources, such as battery life. So in Android 14, newly installed apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that are not clocks or calendars must request the user to grant them the SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM special permission before setting exact alarms. Apps can direct users to the settings page via an intent to toggle this permission, but we encourage you to evaluate your use cases and choose more flexibly scheduled alternatives when possible.

Clock and calendar apps targeting Android 13+ (SDK 33+) that rely on exact alarms as part of their core app workflow will be able to declare the USE_EXACT_ALARM normal permission instead (granted on install). Apps will not be able to publish a version of their app to the Play store with this permission in the manifest unless they qualify based on the policy language.

Customization

We're continuing to make sure that Android users can tune their experience around their individual needs, including enhanced accessibility and internationalization features.

Bigger fonts with non-linear scaling

Starting in Android 14, users will be able to scale up their font to 200%. Previously, the maximum font size scale on Pixel devices was 130%.

To mitigate issues where text gets too large, starting in Android 14, a non-linear font scaling curve is automatically applied. This ensures that text that is already large enough doesn’t increase at the same rate as smaller text.
Examples of text scaling showing the differences between the sizing of standard font at 100% (no scaling)on the left, standard scaling (200%) in the middle, and non-linear scaling (200%)on the rightIn Android 14, you should test your app UI with the maximum font size using the Font size option within the Accessibility > Display size and text settings. Ensure that the adjusted large text size setting is reflected in the UI, and that it doesn’t cause text to be cut off. Our documentation has more on best practices.

Per-app language preferences

You can dynamically update your app's localeConfig with LocaleManager.setOverrideLocaleConfig to customize the set of languages displayed in the per-app language list in Android Settings. This allows you to customize the language list per region, run A/B experiments, and provide updated locales if your app utilizes server-side localization pushes.

IMEs can now use LocaleManager.getApplicationLocales to know the UI language of the current app to update the keyboard language.

Grammatical Inflection API

The Grammatical Infection API allows you to more easily add support for users who speak languages which have grammatical gender. For example,

Masculine: “Vous êtes abonné à...”

Feminine: “Vous êtes abonnée à…”

Neutral: “Abonnement à…activé”

Grammatical gender is inherent to the language and cannot be easily worked around in some non-English languages. This new API lowers the effort to support viewer gender (who’s viewing the UI; not who’s being talked about) as compared to using the SelectFormat in ICU which must be applied on a per string basis.

To show personalized translations, you just need to add translations inflected for each grammatical gender for impacted languages and integrate the API.

Privacy and Security

Runtime receivers

Apps targeting Android 14 must indicate if dynamic Context.registerReceiver() usage should be treated as "exported" or "unexported", a continuation of the manifest-level work from previous releases. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents

To prevent malicious apps from intercepting intents, apps targeting Android 14 are restricted from sending intents internally that don't specify a package. Learn more here.

Safer dynamic code loading

Dynamic code loading (DCL) introduces outlets for malware and exploits, since dynamically downloaded executables can be unexpectedly manipulated, causing code injection. Apps targeting Android 14 require dynamically loaded files to be marked as read-only. Learn more here.

Block installation of apps

Malware often targets older API levels to bypass security and privacy protections that have been introduced in newer Android versions. To protect against this, starting with Android 14, apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 cannot be installed. This specific version was chosen because some malware apps use a targetSdkVersion of 22 to avoid being subjected to the runtime permission model introduced in 2015 by Android 6.0 (API level 23).

On devices that upgrade to Android 14, any apps with a targetSdkVersion lower than 23 will remain installed.

You can test apps targeting an older API level using the following ADB command: 

adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block FILENAME.apk

Credential Manager and Passkeys support

We recently announced the alpha release of Credential Manager, a new Jetpack API that allows you to simplify your users' authentication journey, while also increasing security with support of passkeys. Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors and more convenient for users (they require just a biometric swipe to securely sign in on any device). Read more here.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

OpenJDK 17 Support - This preview includes access to 300 OpenJDK 17 classes. We are working hard to fully enable Java 17 language features in upcoming developer previews. These include record classes, multi-line strings and pattern matching instanceof. Thanks to Google Play system updates (Project Mainline), over 600M devices are enabled to receive the latest Android Runtime (ART) updates that include these changes. This is part of our commitment to give apps a more consistent, secure environment across devices, and to deliver new features and capabilities to users independent of platform releases.

Easier testing and debugging of changes - To make it easier for you to test the opt-in changes that can affect your app, we’ll make many of them toggleable again this year. With the toggles, you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. Check out the details here.
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options
Platform stability milestone - Like last year, we’re letting you know our Platform Stability milestone well in advance, to give you more time to plan for app compatibility work. At this milestone we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and also final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2023, and from that time you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 14

The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. For phones, you can get started today by flashing a system image onto a Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, or Pixel 4a (5G) device. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This initial preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so we're making it available by manual download only. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.

If you intend to move from the Android 13 QPR Beta program to the Android 14 Developer Preview program and don't want to have to wipe your device, we recommend that you move to Developer Preview 1 now. Otherwise you may run into time periods where the Android 13 Beta will have a more recent build date which will prevent you from going directly to the Android 14 Developer Preview without doing a data wipe.

As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.

For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.

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