Google rolled out the second Developer Preview of Android 14 earlier today, bringing with it the selected photos access feature we told you about earlier. As always, a lot of the new features in the new release aren’t visible by default, which is why we painstakingly comb through each release to document what’s new. Our latest finding is a feature that appears to be exclusive to Pixel phones: emoji wallpapers.
Back in January, the New York Times published an article detailing how Google planned to fight the threat posed by ChatGPT. In it, they also laid out some of the company’s image and video projects in the works, including a “wallpaper maker for the Pixel smartphone.” In Android 14 DP2, we spotted a new “Emoji Wallpaper” app bundled in the /product partition. This app, as I just mentioned, seems to be Pixel-exclusive, as its package name is “com.google.android.apps.emojiwallpaper” and it requires the feature flag “com.google.android.feature.PIXEL_EXPERIENCE” to be declared.
By default, the emoji wallpaper picker isn’t active, but after toggling a debug flag, I was able to surface it in the Wallpaper & Picker app. Once enabled, a new “Emoji Lab” option appeared in the wallpaper list. Tapping it opened a UI that let me create a new wallpaper with various emojis. When creating a wallpaper, you can pick up to 14 emojis to be included in the design, choose from patterns like “Mosaic”, “Lotus”, “Stacks”, “Sprinkle”, “Prism”, and pick between various colors. If you don’t know what design you want, you can tap the “randomize” button to let the app create a randomized emoji wallpaper.
After creating an emoji wallpaper, your creation is saved and is visible under Wallpaper & styles > Wallpaper > Emoji Lab. The app can save multiple emoji wallpapers that you create, and you can switch between them by tapping them in the list and then hitting “Set Wallpaper.” You can also tap the pencil icon to edit the emoji wallpaper you already created. You may be able to share emoji wallpapers that you’ve created, but I haven’t been able to surface that feature yet during my initial digging.
As I mentioned before, this feature isn’t enabled by default in Android 14 DP2. Hence, there’s no guarantee it’ll be available when the stable build of Android 14 is released for Pixel phones.