Android 14 Beta 2.1 breaks Pixel cameras; try this fix

The latest Android 14 Beta update to version 2.1 was released to fix some bugs that were caused by the previous Beta releases. But it appears that the update did some damage of its own to an important Pixel feature. On the Android_Beta subreddit you can find some Pixel users complaining that Android 14 Beta 2.1 broke their cameras. Considering that many Pixel owners bought their phones because of the brand's photography capabilities, this is not good news.

For example, Redditor Brent_Fournier69 wrote "Just spent about 5 minutes trying to capture a photo cause it was crashing, freezing, not saving the photo. Honestly might roll back to stable and go through the effort of resetting. Everything else about the beta seems to be working fine, but I use my camera quite a bit so this is very detrimental to my everyday usage."

In other words, this Pixel owner needs his camera so badly that he is willing to go through a factory reset in order to exit the Android 14 Beta program early. We hope he has backed up his data so that the process won't be so painful. A Reddit user with the handle smalltownbird said that an app update for his Pixel 7 Pro's camera is what caused the problem. He wrote, "It worked fine for me yesterday but there was an app update for the camera. Today it freezes when trying to take photos."

There is a fix discovered by the original poster, Brent_Fournier69. He says that he force-stopped the app and cleared the cache twice and since then, his camera has been working fine. Here's how you can try this tactic on your Pixel. Go to Settings > Apps > See all xxx apps. Scroll down to the Camera app and tap on it. That will take you to the Camera app's App info page. On the bar under the Camera app icon, there are three options: Open, Disable, and Force Stop. Tap on Force Stop.

From the same page, tap on Storage & cache and tap Clear cache (do NOT tap on Clear storage). Hit the back arrow in the top left corner and repeat. Hopefully, this will work for you although we should point out that a Reddit subscriber with a Pixel 6 was unable to get his camera working with this fix. Google can't be twiddling its thumbs over a Pixel camera issue which means that Android 14 Beta 2.2 might be released soon.