Android is the most popular operating system for digital note takers or e-notes. Bigme, Onyx Boox, Boyue, Dasung and countless others use it. All these brands have activated Google Play to download millions of paid and free apps. The vast majority of them are using Android 11 or Android 12 and have skipped Android 13. However, the upcoming Android 14 will likely all be embraced when it comes out later this year.
Why will they use Android 14? With this forthcoming release, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on the tablet experience. The push for big screen optimization started with Android 12L and has since been further enhanced with Android 13, and Android 14 is set to be no different. The company rehashes some of the advances made, pointing out developers best practices and new classes that will allow them to build more easily for different form factors.
Google says it’s updated its big-screen app quality checklists, which give developers an easy way to gauge how well their products will perform on different devices. There are also new sample layouts for different types of apps, intended to inspire developers to create similarly adaptive layouts and apps that make the most of the available screen real estate.
Google improves the accessibility of the system. Android 14 allows text to be scaled up to 200% instead of the old maximum of 130%. To avoid any layout problems caused by this setting, Google is also introducing a non-linear scaling curve for fonts. This prevents text that is already large enough from becoming larger than necessary.
Battery life on E INK devices running Android is always an issue. You need to pack big batteries to handle all the background processes. The vast majority of e-readers and e-notes running Android use any Qualcomm or Mediatek CPU processor, which already has solid battery management. Google is making changes with Android 14, Google is streamlining the background processes so that the battery is less drained.
I think most E INK brands that use e-paper displays and run Android will probably all update to Android 14 when it’s ready. Tablet support and higher DPI will be a game changer.
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audio books and e-readers for twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
