The latest iteration of Android is finally here. Android 10 marks the beginning of a new naming tradition (just like iOS) with numbers. This time Android 10 focuses on three important themes – supporting bleeding edge technologies (like foldable smartphones & 5G Network), protecting users’ privacy, and enhancing the digital wellbeing controls.
In this article, let us take a look at what’s new in Android 10.
Best Android 10 Features
There’s a lot of changes under the hood and some noticeable changes. Do note that the features listed below are in no particular order of ranking. So, without going into all the nitty gritty details, let us check out the key features on Android 10 that you should know about.
1. Ready for Bleeding edge Technologies
Android 10 is perfectly capable of powering up a foldable smartphone without any issues. In addition to the support for foldables, Android 10 adds platform support for 5G. So, you can expect the faster speeds and lower latencies on 5G networks.
2. Live Captions
While you are watching a video or listening to an audio file (a voice message) or even podcasts, with Android 10, you can have captions for the content in real-time. This will help you understand the video/audio quickly.
However, the Live caption feature will be available for Pixel devices to start with. Eventually, other partner devices are expected to support it.
3. Smart Reply in Notifications
Smart Reply is a pretty useful feature available in Gmail app when you respond to an email. It is basically an auto-generated suggestion for a reply using machine learning (ML). Technically, it was already introduced with Android 9 Pie. However, in Android 10, it utilizes on-device ML to suggest smart replies to any message in the notifications, keeping users’ privacy in mind. This applies to all 3rd party applications as well. Also, if the dev team of the app wants to generate their own set of custom replies, that can be done too.
4. Dark theme
We have all been waiting for a native system-wide dark mode. And, with Android 10, you can now enable the dark theme. It will be applied to all the applications/system apps. However, the 3rd party apps can still have their own implementation of a custom dark mode, if needed.
5. Immersive Gesture Navigation
Gesture navigation was already introduced with Android P. But, with Android 10, it tries to take the advantage of the full screen by eliminating the notification bar and giving an immersive experience when navigating using gestures.
Personally, I’m still a fan of traditional soft keys – but if you want a full screen immersive experience while navigating through apps, Android 10 gives you the option to do so.
6. More control over location data
With Android 10, you will have more control over how the applications use/access your location data. You can choose to grant access to location data only while using the app or allow it to access your location data all the time.
You also have the option to deny access to your location data when the request pops up.
7. Faster Updates
Starting with Android 10, you will receive important security and privacy fixes via Google Play. This will ensure that more Android devices remain secure no matter what device you have.
8. Greater control of notifications
When you tap and hold a notification, you will be able to mark it as “Silent” – so that you still get notifications from that particular app but there will be no alert sound.
9. Other Significant Changes
In addition to all the new features, you will observe a lot of under-the-hood improvements like storage encryption by default for devices with Android 10, new audio and video codecs, improved Wi-Fi performance, and performance optimizations.
If you’re curious to know every little detail, you can check out the official post on Android Developers Blog for the changelog.
Wrapping Up
Even though the Android 10 upgrade is a big deal, visually it remains the same. The UI may have some minor improvements/tweaks but nothing major – except for the full screen gesture navigation mode. The idea to have important system updates via Google Play steals the show for me.
What do you think about Android 10? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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