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 month, and while that may have been the most polished build at the time, even it couldn't avoid the occasional glitch. After discovering a frustrating bug with the Google Camera app in Beta 2.1, we're happy to announce that it's now resolved with this week's release of Android 14 Beta 3.

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 turned out that the camera app would freeze and then crash moments after attempting to switch to a Pixel phone's ultrawide lens.

In our testing, even after successfully switching to the ultrawide, returning to the primary lens still crashed the camera app. If the crash occurred in video mode, you may have seen a toast message warning that a part of the last recording may not have been saved. This issue seemed to affect Pixel 6 and 7 series devices running Android 14 Beta 2.1.

Thankfully, we had a temporary workaround: When you opened the camera app, you could just switch to the portrait mode, and then back to standard. After doing this, the camera app wouldn't crash, no matter how many times you toggled between the primary and ultrawide lenses. Another way to prevent a crash entailed snapping a photo using the primary lens as soon as the camera app opened — this also seemed to prevent crashes when switching lenses.

Earlier this week, Android 14 Beta 3 was released to testers, and after playing around with the Google Camera app on this build, we are happy to report that it does not crash when you try switching between the primary and ultrawide cameras on your Pixel phone — no more workarounds needed.

UPDATE: 2023/06/09 00:42 EST BY CHANDRAVEER MATHUR

Android 14 Beta 3

This post has been updated to reflect the glitch being fixed in Android 14 Beta 3.

Thanks: Eduardo