GoodBarber Android to the 14th power

The release of Android 14 confirms a trend over the last few years, namely that the OS has matured : annual enhancements are more often not new customization possibilities, or the opportunity to surf on the latest buzzwords in the industry.  

Nevertheless, Google's aim of delivering a premium OS is clear, and it was a pleasant surprise to see that the new version of the system is more resource-efficient, and that our phone's battery was less draines than usual bedtime. 

This premium OS objective is felt above all by the developer, who each year must comply with new rules aimed most often at increasing the application's performance, but above all with regard to transparency with the user, a subject close to our  hearts. 

The end of the year is therefore the time when GoodBarber's Android developers update the engine to offer our customers peace of mind and the assurance that their applications respect Google's latest guidelines and have their place on the store. We've largely rethought our engine, and the historical approach we had to some of our features, to offer great technical possibilities in the future. 

And now, after several week's work, it's time to deliver our version of the GoodBarber engine, now compatible with the latest version of the OS by Google : Android 14. 

For those interested in the (big) impact migration has had on our work, here's the full documentation for developers. 

Let's take a look at what's new for our GoodBarber applications. 

Until recently, we used the phone's media gallery application when choosing a profile photo or video to submit in a form. Now, compatible phones (mainly Android 10+) display a media picker on top of the application. This integrated picker enhances the user experience.  

Permission to access the phone's storage space is no longer required for phones running Android 10 and higher. In fact, the GoodBarber team has modified media access management, enabling the user to select media via the new photo picker or capture an image via the system camera without having to resort to the pop-up requesting access to storage. All this is done in complete security, while respecting the user's privacy. Indeed, via the photo selector, the GoodBarber-generated application only has access to the media selected by the user, and not to all his documents !

Note: 

Storage access permission is still required for certains actions on phones running Android 9 and older. However, it is no longer required to platform the profile photo change and media upload actions. If storage access authorization is granted, it will enable the user to find the media captured via the camera ( from the application) in the their photo gallery on these versions of OS released over 5 years ago now. 

Security improvements have been made possible by the new APIs available with Android 14, when browsing, listening to music and many other actions and navigation. 

From now on, if you have activated the "background audio" option in the compilation settings on your Backoffice, you will need to provide the update on the store with a video showing this behaviour. To do this, we recommend that you follow the steps below for your video:

1. Play a sound in your application
2. Put your application in the background
3. Display the notification bar with the Player
4. Stop and restart the sound using the command on the notification