Android 10 — The Ars Technica Review

[Karlston]

Android 10 — The Ars Technica Review

Clear your schedule: this is our longest Android review ever.

 

It is once again time for Google's big yearly Android rollout. This year we're up to "Android 10," though if we're counting by API levels (which actually go up one per release) this is the 29th release of Android.

 

For most of 2019, this new software snack has been in beta under the name "Android Q," and we've seen a whopping six beta releases. Normally that "Q" would turn into a snack-themed codename with the final release, but this year the "Q" apparently stands for "Quitters"—the codename branding is dead. Android is going on a textual diet and it's just "Android 10," with no snacks attached.

 

Despite the change, Android 10 brings a lot of tasty, frequently user-requested changes to Android. The OS is finally getting a dark mode, the share menu is getting revamped, and gesture navigation has seen huge improvements over the half-baked version introduced in Android 9. Developers have a host of new APIs to play with, including support for upcoming foldable smartphones, floating app "Bubbles," and a new, more generalized biometrics API. And on top of all that, there's a host of changes to work around, like considerations for the new gesture navigation system and new app restrictions focused on privacy and security. Even the notification panel is getting a fresh injection of artificial intelligence, and of course there are new emoji.

 

The under-the-hood work on Android modularity continues, as always, with Android 10. This year "Project Mainline" is the highlighted engineering effort. This initiative creates a new, more powerful file type for system-level code, and it sees several chunks of functionality move out of the difficult-to-update core OS and into the Play Store, where they will get monthly updates. There's new dual boot functionality, too, which will allow curious users to quickly switch between retail and beta builds of Android.

 

As has become Ars tradition, we will be covering every single change in excruciating detail. So even if Google is ditching the snack theme, you may want to grab your own snack before diving in to the following 20,000+ words of Android 10 intel.

Table of Contents

• Android 10—Just Android 10
• Gesture Navigation—Massive improvements, but not quite done yet
  • The Back gesture: Feels great, looks bad
  • The many edge cases of gesture navigation
  • Gesture nav for developers
  • Third-party launchers get left out, again
  • Ready for primetime, pending that future update
• Project Mainline: The next great update scheme
  • APEX versus APK
  • What’s getting updated
    • Security and Media
    • Consistency and ANGLE
    • The Privacy modules
  • A foundation for the future
• New notification panel features
  • New priority notification buckets
  • Smart Replies and Notification Actions
  • Smart replies still aren't very smart
  • Focus Mode
• Dynamic System Update—Dual Boot, for Android
  • Dynamic partitions
• Dark Mode—save your eyes and your battery
  • What's the deal with theming?
• Foldable smartphone support
  • Multi-resume: Fixing split-screen mode for poorly-coded apps
• The new Share menu
• Emoji 12.0—We're up to 3,053 emojis
• Scoped storage: Sandboxing app storage
  • Scoped Storage versus File Managers, FIGHT!
  • Coming next year: Storage Armageddon! Maybe?
• Other privacy changes
• Bubbles—A "Developer Preview" of a floating app API
• Security
  • Adiantum—Storage encryption for everyone
• A few extra settings
• Looking toward the future
  • The Good
  • The Bad
  • The Ugly

 

Snip... this very long article containing many image galleries is best viewed from the source link below or the Table of Contents links above.

 

 

 

Source: Android 10—The Ars Technica Review (Ars Technica)