Hands-on: I finally got this fully working, so here's a full demo of Android 14's new partial screen recording feature.

This feature lets you record a single app without any System UI elements or notifications appearing in the video! A useful feature to have when you need to screen record something to share with others!

(In the app selector dialog, you can swipe up to show the full app list. You can also swipe left or right on the carousel to show more apps from your recents app list.)

EDIT:

If you leave the app you selected to record, then Android will continue screen recording but the content will be black. If you open the app again, the contents will once again be captured in the same recording.

The recording doesn't end unless you swipe down and end it manually.

Android 14 Beta 2 continues to improve on the "app cloning" feature I first revealed in DP1. A new launcher flag called ENABLE_APP_CLONING_CHANGES_IN_LAUNCHER has been added that, when toggled, hides cloned apps from the work profile tab, as illustrated below.

However, the home screen icons are still not differentiated yet, even though in Settings, the cloned apps have a unique icon badge. This will hopefully be remedied in a future build!

For more details on this in-development app cloning feature, refer to this article.

Google has added a new Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) called the Mobile VRP that focuses on its first-party Android apps.

Security researchers that disclose qualifying vulnerabilities impacting Android apps developed or maintained by Google can be rewarded depending on the type of vulnerability, the scenario in which the vulnerability can be exploited, and the importance of the app that's affected.

Full details on the new Google Mobile VRP can be found here.

Here's another look at the lock screen shortcut customization feature Google announced at I/O!

The available shortcuts include:

* QR code scanner
* Flashlight
* Video camera
* Notetaking (see below for explanation)
* Mute
* Wallet
* Camera
* Do Not Disturb
* Device Controls

The attached screen recording shows the lock screen shortcuts feature in action. Note that you can only place a single shortcut on both the left and the right, and that you have to long-press a shortcut to activate it.

Most of the lock screen shortcuts are pretty self-explanatory. Wallet is greyed out because I haven't added a card yet, while notetaking is greyed out because I don't have an app set as the "default notes app."

As I explained in an earlier thread, Android 14 adds support for a default notes app. The default notes app can use the new AppClips API/feature to trigger a screenshot to be taken that the user can edit before inserting into a note.

Given that the Pixel Tablet supports USI styli, I'm guessing this whole notetaking feature is intended for that device. Though Google hasn't announced a 1P stylus accessory yet, and it doesn't seem like Google Keep supports this feature either for now.

Lock screen shortcuts aren't exclusive to Pixel, unlike the new wallpaper features. The shortcut code is available in AOSP (it's called "keyguard quick affordances") as is the documentation.

Hopefully most OEMs enable this in their Android 14 builds!

One of the features I was expecting to see in Android 14 was the ability to turn your phone into a USB webcam for your PC. Google hasn't talked about this feature yet, but I hope they still plan to ship it!

Here's some tidbits about Android 14's USB webcam feature 👇

So back in February, I discovered code changes in AOSP that hinted at a new "DeviceAsWebcam" service (which upon re-reading the code changes I now believe to be a separate system app) that "turns an Android device into a webcam."

Android devices that support the UVC gadget mode (ie. the kernel is compiled with CONFIG_USB_CONFIGFS_F_UVC=y) can be set up to send camera frames to a /dev/video* node that a host device supporting UVC webcams can read from.

A dedicated DeviceAsWebcam app - which I should note has not yet been shipped on any Pixel builds - is what, I believe, would be responsible for actually using Android's Camera API to forward frames.

Only system apps-like DeviceAsWebcam-would have permission to R/W data to the /dev/video* node. In fact, the USB configuration file for all Tensor & Tensor 2-based (but not SM7250) Pixels already sets up the UVC function. Attached to this post is a snippet from init.gs101.usb.rc/init.gs201.usb.rc.

But since the DAW app is not present in current Android 14 beta builds, we can't actually use this functionality, though we can surface the "Webcam" option in "USB Preferences" as shown in the first post. The "Webcam" option appears when the system property ro.usb.uvc.enabled is set to true. Settings calls UsbManager#isUvcSupportEnabled(), which reads this property, to decide whether to show this option.

When you select "webcam", UsbDeviceManager sets the USB config to "uvc" and the android.hardware.usb.action.USB_STATE broadcast is sent with the USB_FUNCTION_UVC boolean extra. DAW presumably listens for this broadcast to know when to start forwarding frames.

Here's a look at potentially all of the custom clock options Pixel users will get in Android 14, courtesy of Kamila Wojciechowska (Za_Raczke on Twitter)!

Google said at I/O that lock screen clock customization will be available "next month", so expect to see these in Android 14 Beta 3.

For comparison, I've also attached the screen recording Google shared at I/O that shows off some of the lock screen clock options. (Google's is the higher resolution one). Kamila's video shows more of the clocks that will likely be available to choose from.