Android 10 released

[Arthur]

A list of new features can be found here and here. The latter is far more comprehensive.

 

Sources: Google (via Ars Technica / Android Police) / Downloads for Pixel phones: OTAs / Factory Images

 

Android 10 is finally finished! The next big Android update, which we've been examining for most of the year as the "Android Q Beta," starts rolling out to devices today. As usual, Android 10 is arriving on Pixel phones first (even the three-year-old Pixel 1), and Google says it is "working with a number of partners to launch or upgrade devices to Android 10 this year." Google has introduced a new branding strategy for Android, by the way, so there's no "Q" snack name with this release. In 2019, it's just "Android 10." Android 10 brings a number of changes to the world's most popular mobile operating system. First up, devices are getting "fully gestural" navigation, which lets you navigate around the phone with swipe gestures. Just like the implementation on the iPhone X, gesture navigation removed the need for a dedicated space for navigation buttons, allowing for more space for app content. There's finally full support for a dark theme, which will turn the entire system UI and any supported apps from the usual black text on a white background to white text on a black background. (That option significantly reduces the amount of light a phone puts out and saves battery life on OLED displays.) Google has also promised dark mode support for "all" of the Google apps in time for Android 10's launch, so we should be seeing updates to Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, and a million other Google apps sometime soon.

 

Notifications are traditionally one of Android's best features, and Google never lets an Android release go out the door without some improvements in this area. This year, the notification panel will use on-device machine learning to parse incoming messages and offer potentially helpful action buttons right in the notification panel. One of the button types is "smart replies," which should be familiar to anyone who has used Gmail or Google Inbox (may it rest in peace). These are short, automatically generated replies to messages that you can send with a single tap. The other notification button type is an "action," which will try to pick out URLs, phone numbers, addresses, or tracking numbers from incoming messages and allow you to zip the data to the appropriate app without even opening that up. Unlike many Android features that require work from the developer, these new notification features work, by default, on everything. If you suffer from too many notifications at any point, Android 10 also offers a new "focus mode" to silence noisy apps and let you get some work (or gaming) done in peace.

With this latest Android release, under the hood we have "Project Mainline," Google's initiative to create a new, more powerful file type for system components. Project Mainline has allowed Google to offload key system code to the Play Store for easier updates. Publicly, Google is branding this "Google Play System Updates," and the feature will allow Google to ship monthly updates to the "Stagefright" media stack, OpenGL, and other components without the need for a full system update. Mainline support is mandatory for all devices that ship with Android 10, and that shift means Google is taking over responsibility for core system code from device manufacturers.

 

Other under the hood updates include a new system for dual-booting multiple versions of Android, called "Dynamic system updates." And Android 10 ships with special support for foldable smartphones, with more robust multi-screen support, display switching, and a reworked app lifecycle that will allow multiple foreground apps to run simultaneously. This will be super useful if a foldable smartphone ever ships.

 

Android 10 will also continue Google's long push for better security and privacy options. "Privacy" gets a top-level spot in the system settings now, providing easy access to app permissions. It's now possible to give an app access to your location only when it is in the foreground, instead of the simple binary "yes, anytime" or "no, never" options that existed before. Android 10 begins the journey toward "scoped storage," which will lock down an app's access to your device's storage, although in this release it is opt-in due to compatibility concerns. On the security front, we have more hardening of the media stack (and the aforementioned updatability of the media stack!), an improved biometrics API, and support for updated security protocols like TLS 1.3 and WPA3.

 

Even cheaper devices will see a major upgrade with a new addition called "Adiantum," which is a method for block-level storage encryption that offers high performance on devices without support for hardware-accelerated encryption. Today, the cheapest devices with ancient SoCs like the ARM Cortex A7 ship without storage encryption turned on because it is so slow, but with the higher performance of Adiantum, encryption will be mandatory on all devices.

 

There are a million other features in Android 10 I neglected to mention: a much faster share sheet, a "bubbles" API for floating apps, 230 new emoji, and much, much more. So if you're interested in reading all about Android 10's new features in excruciating detail, Ars will have our biggest-ever Android review posted sometime soon.

 

The wait is over. Android 10 lands today — at least, for Google's Pixels.

 

An update delivering Google's latest flavor of Android will be rolling out the company's own hardware soon, giving them piles of new software features including a system-wide dark theme, redesigned gesture navigations, improved notification controls, and privacy enhancements, all among plenty of other changes.

 

According to Google, Android 10 has less than 50 new features, but our own (probably more pedantic) count is already well past 100. You should be familiar with the headlining changes even if you've been living under a rock for the last six months, but there are plenty of less marketable tweaks like MAC address randomization, visual reorganizations, and piles of new APIs.

 

Our top five favorites in no particular order are:

 

• Project Mainline, which allows system components to be upgraded separately from the OS.
  
• Dark Theme for enhanced night-time eye comfort.
  
• New gesture navigation for fluid, iOS-style swiping between apps, navigating back, going "home," and launching Google Assistant.
  
• A less lag-tastic share menu. It might still lack some features we'd like to see, but the new share menu loads a whole lot faster than the old one, and at least targets won't change as your finger is about to tap them.
  
• Reworked permissions and privacy that includes more granular location options, restrictions on background activities, and fewer identifiable features for tracking/targeting.
  

Android 10 may have marked the end of more than one era, but it's the next step in our favorite operating system and our raison d'être here at Android Police. For more details on precisely what Android 10 brings to the table, check out our monumental list of Android Q features.

 

Not every anticipated feature is being delivered with this update, though. You may remember an accessibility service called Live Caption, which transcribes audio from apps in real time and was shown off back at I/O earlier this year. That won't be rolling out until later this fall, according to Google. Support for gestures in third-party launchers will also have to wait until a post-launch update.

 

While Google's Pixels will be first to get the Android 10 update, the company is working with partners and other manufacturers to get it into more phones. A dozen other OEMs participated in the Android Q Beta Program, so the delay will be longer for some of us than others. (If history is any indicator, Essential fans won't have long to wait at all.)

Edited September 3, 2019 by Arthur