Google Begins Rolling Out Android Pie To Select Handsets (venturebeat.com)

Google on Monday announced that the 'P' in Android P stands for Android Pie, succeeding Android Oreo. It also pushed the source code of the latest version to the Android Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The latest version of Google's mobile operating system, Android 9.0 Pie, is also starting to roll out today as an over-the-air update to Pixel phones, the company said. From a report: If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all). During the beta testing phase, Android P was made available on the Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6, and Essential PH-1. [...] Google wants you to know that Android Pie includes a "heaping helping of artificial intelligence baked in to make your phone smarter, simpler, and more tailored to you."

Android Pie offers of a slew of new features including built-in support for display cutouts (read: notches), a tweaked Quick Settings panel, a notification drawer with rounded corners, messages in notifications when replying inline, smart replies in notifications, a consistent UI for fingerprint authentication, privacy enhancements to limit what apps can do in the background, Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness features (courtesy of Google DeepMind), App Actions for predicting what the user will do next, App Slices for surfacing an app's user interface inside the Google app's search results and inside Google Assistant, a BiometricPrompt API for a system-managed dialog to prompt the user for any supported type of biometric authentication, and multi-camera APIs that let you access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras.

Comments

Wrong version number for pie.

[xack]

It should be version 3.14 not 9.0.

Re:Wrong version number for pie.

[jfdavis668]

3.11 should have been Android for Workgroups

First test of Project Treble

[swillden]

The summary says:

If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all).

... but there's reason to think that should be significantly less true than with previous releases. Android Oreo included Project Treble, which defined a hard boundary between the system and device-specific components that didn't previously exist. This only applied to new devices launched with Oreo, but on those ones it should be possible for device makers to simply drop a Pie system image on them and expect it to work. This should make O -> P upgrades smoother and faster than any previous pair of releases.

Of course, the devil is in the details. There is a tremendous amount variety in the Android world, and OEMs have traditionally had almost unlimited ability to modify the system as long as the app-level APIs continued to function correctly (as validated by the Compliance Test Suite). So Treble represents a sea change and there will undoubtedly be lessons to be learned and problems to fix. Also, OEMs who like to customize the system heavily will want to port all of their customizations to Pie, and that will take time, in proportion to the amount of customization they do. Devices that ship stock Android, or close to it, however, should be easy to upgrade.

Should. Over the next few months we'll start to find out how successful Treble was in achieving its goals, and how much more work remains to be done. The relatively large number of devices that ran the preview releases is a very positive sign, but time will tell.