Android 14 may be introducing a new feature that could let you tell apps ahead of time what your regional preferences are so they can better personalize your experience.

Android is installed on literally billions of devices around the world, so it’s important that the platform is adequately localized for all kinds of users. AOSP supports a lot of different languages out of the box, and apps can easily specify what languages they support by supplying different resource files. Many users are multilingual, however, so they may want to use one or more apps in a certain language without having to change the language system-wide.

It wasn’t until Android 13, however, that these users could actually set language preferences on a per-app basis. That was a huge feature no doubt, but there’s more to consider when it comes to localization, like the temperature units, calendar type, first day of week, and number system. Developers can derive what formats they should use based on the locale that’s currently set, of course. For example, if the user sets their language to English (United States), then they’ll probably want to see temperature units in Fahrenheit.

But what if the user is an American who recently moved to the UK, or anywhere else that predominantly uses Celsius, and they want to familiarize themselves with how the weather works in their new home? It isn’t always appropriate to assume what formats a user wants to use, because with billions of Android users out there, there are going to be a lot of users who mix and match their settings.

That’s why a lot of apps just ask the user what their preferences are. However, that means apps have to implement these settings. It also means that users have to change these settings for each and every app that offers them, which can be confusing due to differing menu placements. This is why Google added the per-app language feature in Android 13; apps on Android 13 no longer have to implement their own in-app language settings and users don’t have to deal with sifting through multiple different settings screens.

In Android 14, Google seems to be extending this idea to more places. The company is testing a new “regional preferences” feature in Android 14 that lets users set their preferred temperature units, calendar, first day of week, and number system for each locale. “Regional preferences” appears under Settings > System > Languages & input when a hidden developer flag is toggled. As such, it currently doesn’t appear for users on Android 14 DP1, so I had to manually enable it to get it to appear in settings.

You can use the feature to “let apps know your regional preferences so they can personalize your experience.” On each subpage, there’s a note that says, “apps will use your regional preferences where possible.” For temperature units, users can select between Celsius (°C) and Fahrenheit (°F). For Calendar, they can pick between the Chinese Calendar, Dangi Calendar, Hebrew Calendar, Indian National Calendar, Islamic Calendar, or Persian Calendar. The number system that can be chosen depends on the current system locale, while I don’t think I need to tell you what the options are for the first day of week.

It isn’t clear yet how apps will actually read the user’s regional preferences. I have some ideas, but since I’m not 100% sure, I’ll just wait for the documentation to go live (assuming this feature isn’t scrapped).