Google’s first public beta for Android 14 felt a little undercooked, with plenty of annoying bugs and inoperable features. A point release followed soon after, fixing a handful of those issues, and Beta 2 came through with even more. Android 14 Beta 2.1 arrived late last week, and while this may be the most polished build yet, even it can’t avoid the occasional glitch. Now the latest to rear its ugly head is causing problems with the Google Camera app.
For every one thing that Google fixes, it seems to break something else. While we were hopeful Android 14 Beta 2.1 would leave us with a perfectly functional OS, it turns out that the camera app freezes and then crashes moments after attempting to switch to A Pixel’s ultrawide lens.
In our testing, even after successfully switching to the ultrawide, returning to the primary lens crashes the camera app. If the crash occurs in video mode, you may see a toast message saying a part of the last recording may not have been saved. Shorty after upgrading the Android 14 beta, Camera prompted us to install a 300+MB update, but sadly, that doesn’t fix this behavior. This issue seems to affect Pixel 6 and 7 series devices running Android 14 Beta 2.1.
Thankfully, there is a workaround: When you open the camera app, just switch to the portrait mode, and then back to standard. After doing this, the camera app shouldn’t crash, no matter how many times you toggle between the primary and ultrawide lenses. Another way to prevent a crash entails snapping a photo using the primary lens as soon as the camera app opens — this also seems to prevent crashes when switching lenses.
Interestingly, the app doesn’t crash when you record a video with the ultrawide lens and then switch to the primary. If you’d rather just not jump through these hoops at all, and miss the days when using your phone felt reliable, this release finally allows you to exit the beta entirely and revert to Android 13 stable, if you prefer. But for those sticking around, we hope Google resolves this issue in the Camera app and releases a fix soon.
Thanks: Eduardo
