With numerous irritating issues and unusable functionality, Google’s first public beta for Android 14 felt to be underdeveloped. A few of these problems were addressed in a point release that came shortly after, and more were addressed in Beta 2. Even though this may be the most refined build to date, Android 14 Beta 2.1 still had several bugs late last week. The most recent to make an appearance is now causing issues with the Google Camera app.
Google appears to break something else for every issue it resolves. While we had hoped that Android 14 Beta 2.1 would leave us with a fully functional OS, it turns out that the camera app stalls and fails shortly after trying to switch to a Pixel’s ultrawide lens.
In our testing, moving back to the primary lens caused the camera app to crash, even after switching to the ultrawide lens successfully. You might receive a toast warning stating that a portion of the most recent recording might not have been saved if the crash happened in video mode. Camera encouraged us to apply a 300+ MB update shortly after updating the Android 14 beta, but regrettably, that didn’t fix this behavior. Android 14 Beta 2.1-powered Pixel 6 and 7 series devices appear to be affected by this problem.
Fortunately, there is a workaround: simply switch to portrait mode when the camera app opens, then back to regular. No matter how many times you switch between the primary and ultrawide lenses after completing this, the camera app should no longer crash. Another approach to avoiding a crash is to take a picture with the camera’s primary lens as soon as it launches; this also seems to stop crashes when switching lenses.
Interestingly, if you record a video with the ultrawide lens and then swap it to the primary lens, the program doesn’t crash. This release now enables you to completely escape the beta and return to Android 13 stable if you like. If you’d rather skip all these hoops and miss the times when using your phone felt dependable, this release is for you. But for those who are still reading, we hope Google fixes this problem in the Camera app and makes a patch available soon.
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