What’s New in Android KitKat 4.4.2 for Nexus 4

Google has pushed another version of Android KitKat as an update to its initial KitKat Version 4.4. Few users reported receiving KitKat 4.4.1 as an update. Most of us are directly receiving Android KitKat 4.4.2. This over the air update was pushed originally to Nexus 5 users, primarily to fix its camera issues. The update has now been extended to other Nexus devices including Nexus 4. My device received this update on December 12, 2013.

There aren’t a lot of changes that are noticeable when Android updated from 4.4 to 4.4.2. I guess it is because most of the updates are related to bug fixes and this one isn’t a major update like Android KitKat 4.4. Those updates do not do much on the user interface side which is noticeable quickly. In this post I am trying to list out all the noticeable changes in Android KitKat 4.4.2. The changes were noticed primarily by me and a few other users.

User Interface Change in Lock Screen

The first thing that I noticed after upgrading was the change in the user interface in the lock screen. The notification bar is transparent in the lock screen. But it does not stay the same. After unlocking the phone, there is a transition in which the notification bar goes from transparent to being opaque once again. Looks like a teaser of Nexus 5, which actually has transparent notification bar all the time.

Photo Application

Photo application seems to be slowly taking over the default gallery app. In your camera, you swipe to the right to browse the photos in your phone. This task is now handled by the photos app by default. Previously, Gallery used to handle this.

Auto Awesome Movie

When I was using my phone, suddenly it notified me that my awesome movie was ready. Turns out this is a feature of compiling selected videos and photos in my phone into one single cool video/photo mash-up file with classy Instagram like effects. This is a feature of new Photos app and I am not sure whether the feature was previously available in the app.

Google Now Widget

I looked at the widgets and searched for the Google Now widget only because other people were mentioning it. Turns out Google Now, now has a widget. You can place it in your home screen for easy access. But Google Now does not work for all countries, like it is supposed to. When I put it on my home screen, it says “Google Now is not available”.

ART Related WhatsApp Bug

When I changed my default Android runtime from Dalvik to ART, WhatApp was the app that had the most problem with it. It just did not support this app. Turns out, Google made a fix for this in Android 4.4.1. Now users of WhatsApp should be easily able to run this app, even when using ART runtime.

As for me, I have a rather different WhatsApp problem. I extended my term for WhatsApp for another year and it is the only app for which I have made a payment in my phone. When it was having an ART runtime problem, I thought I could solve it my reinstalling the app. As it turns out now, I can’t even install the app. I get an error saying- Unknown Error code during application install: “-24”. I tried downloading the .apk and installing, but this method fails as well.

I have search a lot about this Android Unknown Error 24, and people are getting success when they cleared the data/data/com.whatsapp from their phone. But turns out, we have to have a rooted phone for this. I am not yet ready to root my Nexus 4. So, I am still looking for an alternative way to fix it.