Google introduced a new dedicated media picker with Android 13. Rather than give apps potential access to all your files via the familiar document picker, this new option offers both a more private and easier to use option for those occasions when you want to share images. Google managed to make this media picker a part of the Google Play Services, which means that you don’t actually need to have Android 13 on your phone to use it. And in fact, Google has just confirmed that it has now backported the feature all the way to Android 4.4 KitKat, first released in 2013.
As part of the November 2022 Google System Updates release notes that cover what has changed with the newest Play Services updates, Google added that it would enable “photo picker support back to Android 4.4.” This cuts the story as clear as it gets, and it shows just how well Google’s compartmentation of Android works. Rather than require a system update to introduce a significant change in file access like this, Google was able to just push it out as a part of its Play Services package, to an OS that received its last updates in 2017 and was released nine years ago. That's even better than what we previously expected, with us thinking the company would go back to Android 9 Pie only.
For the media picker, this means that developers can adopt it in their apps much quicker than they normally would. Rather than developers having to wait for most Android handsets to be updated to a version that supports this feature, they can rely on the media picker being an integral part of any phone that runs Play Services.
One of the first apps to take advantage of the media picker broadly is Google Voice, as discovered by 9to5Google. In what appears to be a server-side app update, the new photo picker replaces the previous built-in solution for the one that’s now a part of almost all Android phones out there. It also switches to using your phone’s native camera interface rather than a self-made solution, which should give you much better results. Since the photo picker comes as a server-side update, it might take some time until it shows up in your Google Voice app, too.