With a dearth of options, your first guess was probably right
Android 13 is very much still in development (as we wait not-so-patiently for Beta 1 to finally land) but even with its stable release still months off, pieces are already starting to fall into place for further-out Android versions. One question we’ve been kicking around for a while now concerns which dessert beginning with the letter U might be chosen as the development code name for Android 14 — and it’s not like there are a ton of obvious U-names to choose from. Today we finally get our answer, with Android 14 set to go by the code name Upside Down Cake.
Google formally clarifies the code name in some recent notes added to the AOSP (spotted by 9to5Google). Honestly, that’s the first U-dessert we thought of, mentioning it as a likely option back when confirmation arrived for Android 13’s Tiramisu name. Even getting our U from “upside-down” feels like a bit of a cheat, but it’s not like there were a ton of other obvious options. If we start going international with our dessert menu, that could start opening things up a little, but ultimately it’s not at all surprising to see Google go in this direction.
Dessert names used to be a much more prominent part of new Android releases, and you’ll still hear long-time users affectionately reference past versions like Lollipop or ICS. Even when we weren’t talking about the dessert itself, it was still common to refer to its letter: Android M, or Android Q. But for the launch of Android 10 in 2019, Google took a step back from this association, instead embracing the numerical version as the preferred way to talk about Android.
That shift did make a whole lot of sense — it’s clean, it’s accessible, and really is just a lot more professional-sounding — but for those of us who long for the days when there was just a little more “fun” in Android development, at least the desserts live on as internal code names.
Android 15 is a long way off, but does anyone want to make any bets as to what our V-name might be? Vanilla-something could be obvious, or will Google take us in a new direction? Your guess is as good as ours.
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