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.
Android Q
View more storiesNotifications 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.
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