Ordinarily, public-facing Android beta builds are fairly stable. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Android 14 Beta 1, which has more than a few bugs and issues.
In most cases, Google won’t release a beta in such a state. Given the issues, Android 14 Beta 1 feels closer to a Developer Preview in all but name. We would not recommend sideloading or enrolling on the beta for a little while longer as a result.
Annoyingly, ahead of time, you might not have known about the potential pain points. The experience is not as slick as we have come to expect from such releases. There are quite a few “known” issues including for picture-in-picture mode, which can just stop playing or videos will flicker.
The “Wallpaper & style” app has an issue in Android 14 Beta 1 whereby it can crash on launch. This is caused by the “Themed icons” toggle, which is responsible for toggling your home screen app icons into the monochrome Dynamic Color icons. Luckily, there is a fix that involves just clearing the cache and storage for the Pixel Launcher app. However, this sometimes reappears after activating again on some devices.
In our experience, UI artefacts are common and on-screen gestures just stop working at times and lock up the phone. This is especially prominent when navigating the Settings menu, where you might encounter full device freezes for seconds at a time. Android 14 Beta 1 issues don’t stop there though. Some people have experienced missing network icons in the Status bar, and overall lag is up quite drastically.
Now, this is a Beta after all, so it’s never going to be perfect. That said, this is the first public-facing preview of Android 14, and it’s not exactly going great at this stage. We Pixel owners are going to flash this on our main phones regardless of how many times we’re warned.
We’d certainly suggest using the Android Beta Feedback app on Pixel devices to report issues in Android 14 Beta 1 as you see or encounter them. You can access it from the drawer or via Quick Settings to file bugs in the Google issue tracker. There’s also the Android Beta community on Reddit where you can share your problems. Let us know what problems you’ve had down using the poll below:
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