Random Musings on the Android 14 Developer Beta 2
When Google releases a new beta, I rummage throughthe API differences reportthe high-level overviews,and even the release blog post,to see if there are things that warrant more attention from developers. I try to emphasize mainstream features that any developermight reasonably use, along with things that may notget quite as much attention, because they are buried in the JavaDocs.
Not surprisingly, the pace of change is down now that Beta 2 is out. My focus ison the developer side; see Mishaal Rahman���s Twitter thread for a broader look at Beta 2.
Of note:
A fair number of APIs were removed. That is not surprising at this stage and probablyrepresents ideas that were not going to be ���fully baked��� in time for the Android 14release. One example is the PersistableBundle-based extras on PendingIntentthat I covered in the Beta 1 preview��� those are now removed.
Similarly, a few things that had been deprecated are now undeprecated. Whetherthat is because they found new use cases or their replacements were not yetready is unclear. Examples include the getApplicationRestrictions() methodson UserManager and RestrictionsManager.
WindowManager gained a series of PROPERTY_COMPAT constants, such asPROPERTY_COMPAT_ALLOW_DISPLAY_ORIENTATION_OVERRIDE. These let you opt out ofcertain behaviors, such as forcing activities to landscape. You specify thesevia child elements of in the manifest.
MotionEvent has getEventTimeNanos() and getHistoricalEventTimeNanos(),to get finer-grained resolution than the millisecond-based methods like getEventTime().
Google continues baking the notion of financed devices into the OSDeviceManager, as I mentioned back in musings on Developer Preview 1.DevicePolicyManager lets you determine if the device is financed andfind out about changes in the financing state.
TextView now explicitly has setLineHeight(),rather than only being able to specify line spacing.
There is a new PROVIDE_OWN_AUTOFILL_SUGGESTIONS permission, but it is only availableto ���the Browser application���, however Google is defining that.
Similarly, there are new permissions related to credentials, such asPROVIDE_REMOTE_CREDENTIALS.
It is likely that this is the last set of random musings for Android 14, unless somethingunexpected happens with the next release.
