Google releases final quarterly build of Android 14: Here's what's new

Google announced their latest quarterly Pixel Feature Drop update earlier today, and with it comes the third and final quarterly build of Android 14: Android 14 QPR3. Android 14 QPR3 has been in beta testing since early February, leaving plenty of time for Google to catch and fix bugs. In terms of new, user-facing features, there isn’t much to talk about, but here’s a quick rundown of some of the changes I found during the beta program:

• Android 14 QPR3 brings the new “high quality mode” to the USB webcam feature. This dramatically improves the video quality in my testing.
• QPR3 shows a preview before you change the keyboard layout for a connected physical keyboard.
• The update renames the top-level Settings page for “passwords & accounts” to “passwords, passkeys, & autofill.”
• It adds a new “keyboard vibration” toggle under Settings > Sound & vibration > Vibration & haptics that globally controls whether keyboard haptics are enabled (so long as the keyboard app supports that).
• When you adjust the brightness from the slider in Quick Settings, there’s now a subtle haptic effect (on some devices).
• There’s two new accessibility options for physical keyboard users: “sticky keys” and “bounce keys”. Sticky keys make it easier to enter keyboard shortcuts in quick succession. When you press a modifier key like Ctrl or Alt with sticky keys enabled, it'll stay pressed so you don't have to hold it down while pressing other keys. Bounce keys let the system ignore rapid, repeated presses of the same key.
• Under Settings > Security & privacy > More security & privacy, there's a new "allow camera software extensions" toggle that's enabled by default. This toggle "enables the default software implementation of advanced camera features, such as Eyes Free videography." This feature basically lets the Android OS provide some fallback Camera2/CameraX vendor extensions in cases where the OEMs don't provide their own.

There are some other, more minor changes in Android 14 QPR3 I didn’t mention, but they’re not really too exciting. The third quarterly platform release is usually the least exciting since it’s the final one and intended to fix any remaining bugs in the current version of the OS as we prepare to move onto the next release. 

Under the hood, though, Android 14 QPR3 should actually prove to be quite exciting for AOSP platform developers. This is because, thanks to Google’s trunk stable project, the source code for Android 14 QPR3 should actually include quite a few of the new features, changes, and APIs we’ll see in Android 15. These features, changes, and APIs are disabled at build time using Google’s new feature flag system known as aconfig, though. If you’re interested in learning more about these topics, check out this presentation I gave a few months ago during the bimonthly AOSP and AAOS meetup.

Google should begin uploading the source code for Android 14 QPR3 to the public main branch of AOSP today, though it’ll take some time for the entire source to be uploaded. If you’re an AOSP developer who’s interested in taking a peek at Android’s latest source code drop, let me know if you spot something interesting!