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Here’s what Android 14’s new partial screen recording for a single app looks like

Android 14 seems to be bringing a bunch of quality-of-life tweaks to the platform, and that apparently includes screen recording which will gain the ability to record just an app of your choice.

Screen recording in Android allows for users to capture what’s on screen and the attached audio as a video file on their device. It’s a feature that has tons of different use cases, from capturing bugs to something as simple as capturing a video to edit on your device. However, screen recording isn’t always ideal without tweaking it later, as you’ll often capture elements you don’t want, such as when stopping recording from the notification tray.

In Android 14, that seems to be changing, with Google tweaking screen recording to allow users to skip any system UI elements and just focus on a single app.

Our Kyle Bradshaw previously enabled the feature, but it wasn’t working at the time. Google also announced the feature at I/O earlier this month during the “What’s new in Android” session.

When the screen recording menu in Android 14 is accessed, it shows the option to record the “entire screen” or just “a single app.” If you pick the latter, you can then pick from any app on your device or those which have recently been opened up. When an app is chosen, recording begins and Android will automatically block all system UI elements from the recording. This includes swiping down for notifications, as well as seeing notification previews, the time, and more.

The focus truly is just on the app you want to record. If you leave the app entirely, the recording goes black, as Mishaal Rahman shows in a demo of the feature on Twitter.

This seems like a great addition to Android’s already-useful screen recording tool, as the wide use of screen recordings all too often ends with the user swiping down their notifications to stop the recording.

It’s not fully confirmed if this would be available in Android 14’s final release later this year, but we certainly hope it makes the cut.

More on Android 14:

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Avatar for Ben Schoon Ben Schoon

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