While Android 13 isn’t rolling out to some Android phones yet, we’re already waiting to see what Android 14 has to offer in 2023. As amazing as Android is, it’s still missing a lot of features that we think can greatly improve your user experience. .
Here are nine features we want to see in Android 14 in 2023.
Over time, your home screen can get cluttered as you fill it with different apps and widgets. With stacked widgets, you can stack multiple widgets on top of each other to reduce the space they take up on your screen.
This way you can add useful widgets to your home screen and get the most out of your Android phone without cluttering the screen. The iPhone introduced the feature first, Samsung phones already have it thanks to One UI 5, and we’d like Android to stock the copy.
2. Put apps to sleep
Another feature we want to see in Android 14 is the ability to put unused apps to sleep. Nobody likes apps running in the background for no reason, so putting them to sleep prevents them from using your phone’s resources like battery life, RAM, and processing power.
There are third-party apps on the Play Store that you can download that replicate this functionality, but they are often unreliable and can sometimes cause unforeseen issues such as apps crashing and notifications not being sent. A built-in function would be ideal.
3. Lock Individual Apps
You may want to keep some of your apps locked for privacy, such as gallery, banking apps, investing apps, period trackers, dating apps, and messaging apps.
Android currently has no functionality to lock individual apps with a password, although some Android skins such as Oppo’s ColorOS and Xiaomi’s MIUI allow this.
App Lock gives you peace of mind that even if someone bypasses your lock screen, they won’t be able to access certain apps that you want to keep private.
4. Battery health indicator
As you use your phone for years, its overall battery condition deteriorates, which means it can’t hold as much charge as it used to. In other words, it limits the total capacity of your battery due to the natural wear and tear of the battery material.
You can check battery status on iPhones, but there is no such feature on Android. Ideally, your battery should retain around 80% of its maximum capacity after 800 charge cycles. So if you charge your phone once a day, you’ll want to replace the battery after about two years.
5. Built-in temporary email addresses
No phone on the market currently offers a built-in tool for generating temporary email addresses, and we’d love for Android to pioneer this feature. A temporary email address allows you to dodge apps and sites that ask you to enter your email to access their service, then later bombard you with irrelevant marketing ads and spam.
With a built-in temporary email tool, you can just press a button, copy the email address and paste it where you need it. This way you can prevent your real email address from being automatically subscribed to unknown newsletters and prevent your inbox from being flooded.
Not too long ago, Google announced My Ad Center, a place where you can adjust your ad preferences to see more or less of a particular ad category. This was touted as a way to be more transparent about the type of ads you see on Google Search, YouTube, and Discover.
It’s a great tool, but most people don’t know it exists because it’s not yet integrated into Android. If there was a menu in device settings to access My Ad Center, people would be more eager to check it out and use the feature to customize their ad preferences.
7. Better lock screen customization
Android is known for its choice, but recently iPhones have become more and more customizable to the point where they now have better lock screen customization. On iOS, you can change the style, font, and color of the clock, and also add useful widgets.
Samsung’s latest One UI 5 added better lock screen customization for Galaxy phones, but Android doesn’t have the same yet. We’d like to see Android 14 introduce new options to customize your lock screen and the ability to add widgets to the top.
8. Manual control of the material you
We love the Material You design language introduced with Android 12, and Google has made improvements to it since launch. But we can’t help but notice that it doesn’t give you the ability to customize individual UI elements.
For example, you cannot choose different colors for the Quick Settings panel and the Clock widget. The system simply uses the color palette you selected and automatically applies colors based on what it thinks is the best match. And while it works pretty well on its own, we’d also like to be able to set the colors manually.
9. Lift a subject from the background of the photo
With iOS 16, Apple introduced a very useful new feature to iPhones: the ability to isolate a subject from its background and instantly share it with others. It’s basically a built-in tool to remove the background from any image, but what makes it so special is how easy it is to use.
All you have to do is long press on the subject of the photo; once it’s underlined, you can share it with others, drag it into a text box, or copy and paste it as a clipboard item. It’s fast, intuitive and really practical. Suffice it to say, we want Android 14 to copy this feature.
Android 14 could be so much more
We remain curious to see what Android 14 will bring. While some changes are more likely, such as Material You improvements and better lock screen customization, others may carry over to Android 15, including stacked widgets, app locks and battery status indicator.
For the first time ever, it looks like iPhones are slightly ahead of Android when it comes to cool new features. Hopefully Android 14 can turn things around again in 2023.