Google’s first public beta for Android 14 had a lot of bugs and features that didn’t work. It felt a little unfinished. Soon after, a point release came out that fixed a few of these problems, and Beta 2 fixed even more. Android 14 Beta 2.1 came out at the end of last week. This may be the most polished build so far, but it still has the odd bug. The Google Camera app is now having trouble because of the latest bad thing.
Google seems to break something every time it fixes something. We were hoping that Android 14 Beta 2.1 would give us a fully functional operating system, but it turns out that the camera app freezes and then crashes as soon as we try to switch to the ultrawide lens on the Pixel A.
Even after successfully switching to the ultrawide lens, when we tried to switch back to the main lens, the camera app crashed. If the crash happens while you are recording video, you may see a message that says part of the last recording may not have been saved. Shortly after we updated to Android 14 beta, Camera asked us to install a 300+ MB update. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fix the problem. This problem seems to happen on Android 14 Beta 2.1 devices in the Pixel 6 and 7 series.
There is a way around this, though. When you open the camera app, just switch to portrait mode and back to standard. After you do this, the camera app shouldn’t crash when you switch between the primary and ultrawide lenses, no matter how many times you do it. Another way to keep the camera app from crashing is to take a picture with the primary lens as soon as it opens. This also seems to keep the app from crashing when switching lenses.
When you record a video with the ultrawide lens and then switch to the main lens, the app doesn’t crash. If you’d rather not go through all of these hoops and miss the days when using your phone felt safe, you can finally leave the beta and go back to Android 13 stable with this release. But for those who stay, we hope Google fixes this problem in the Camera app soon and puts out a fix.
