Despite renowned leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks) on Twitter hinting that the next version of Android, Android P, would launch on the 20th of August, Google has gone ahead today and released it to the public, along with a brand new name.
Android 9 Pie it is. Nope, not Peppermint, Pistachio, or whatever other names that were floating around. Pie—implying that this version of Android will offer an even simpler experience.
What’s new?
Google says that this release is “powered by AI” so your phone “adapts to you.” Features like Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness learn and get better over time, so in theory, you will have to do less adjusting.
App Actions are contextual buttons within your app launcher that change based on a number of factors such as location and time. Personally, during the developer previews of Android P, I didn’t find these very useful (and fortunately, if you don’t too, you can disable them in home screen settings), but YMMV.
Later this fall (likely with 9.1 and the Pixel 3), Google plans to roll out Slices. Slices show up when searching for certain things in Google Search and display relevant information.
Android 9 Pie also brings a new gesture navigation (that I still don’t find very intuitive) along with a new recents view. And perhaps my favorite feature of Pie is Smart Text Selection which allows you to copy, search, or share text or images that you’ve selected from the recents view.
Digital Wellbeing is another feature that will officially launch on Pixel phones this fall, with Android One and other devices coming later this year. Some of these new features include a new Dashboard that tells you how much time you’ve used your device, an App Timer to set time limits on certain applications, the new Do Not Disturb that silences and hides all notifications until turned off, and Wind Down, which switches on Night Light and Do Not Disturb and fades the screen to grayscale.
However, enthusiasts who have a Pixel and are running Android 9 can actually sign up for a beta to try out these new features. You can click here to sign up for the beta. Google says that it may take up to 24 hours for the Digital Wellbeing section to show up in your phone’s Settings app once you’ve accepted the invitation email, but if you’re impatient, you can download it here from APKMirror. In addition, some users were actually able to get it to work from this Play Store app testing link.
Note: The below Play Store listing may not show for you if you are not enrolled in the testing program.
Which devices will get it?
OTAs to Android 9 along with the August 5th security patch have already begun rolling out to all Pixel phones (Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL). And at the time of this writing, Essential is already rolling the update out to the PH-1 just 12 minutes after Google.
Devices that participated in the Beta program from Sony, Xiaomi, HMD Global (Nokia), Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, as well as all eligible Android One devices, will receive this update by the end of this fall. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how quickly device manufactures can get Pie out to their phones given Project Treble’s launch last year with Android 8.0 Oreo.
