Been a couple of months but it has been busy here. As I previously mentioned I needed to update the Android version of my app to Android 14 by this fall. No rush but I wanted to try the update tool that Microsoft created to help with the update to MAUI. Some parts worked well and some were going to be tedious. In the meantime Microsoft must’ve gotten a lot of flack from developers that used Xamarin so Xamarin now can target Android 14. I’ve tested that and it worked perfect.
OTOH, I started getting some support emails about problems with Location services on Android phones running Android 14. As far as I could see both on an Android 14 emulator running the current release which targets Android 13 there was no problem. Same with the Android 14 targeted version.
Unfortunately I don’t have an Android 14 device to test this and if I did it might just work fine anyway. Some searching for Android 14 bugs turned up quite a few articles on problems with Android 14 including location services. Seems that some devices didn’t come to users with all the necessary services turned on for location services to work properly. Usually if the user is doing a device update and those services were on their previous phone it would get turned on when the app is installed as long as Google’s app backups work. So either users needed to turn those on themselves if the carrier didn’t do it originally or the backup install did it.
I’m not quite sure why Google wants to set this yearly hoop anyway. It probably produces rushed work on the release. It might be under pressure from phone manufacturers so that the SDK supports the latest and greatest features. It’s all about marketing.