Google's new Android update is a sign that its wildly popular smartphone software is 'growing up,' says a company executive who's been there since the beginning
- Android 10, Google's newest mobile software, is launching for the company's Pixel devices on Tuesday.
- The new update will introduce features focused on privacy and accessibility, among other changes.
- It's also the first version of Android in a decade that won't be nicknamed after a dessert.
- Business Insider spoke with Dave Burke, Google's vice president of engineering for Android, about the update to coincide with its launch.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
As Google typically does every year around late summer or early fall, the search giant is releasing its next major update to its Android operating system: the software that powers more than 86% of smartphones around the world.
But there are a few characteristics that make this year's launch different from any other.
Android 10, which launched for Google's Pixel devices on Tuesday, is the first software version in a decade that isn't nicknamed after a dessert, marking a notable shift in the company's branding. Instead, the new mobile operating system will simply be called Android 10.
"I think maybe the moving to numbers and the rebranding is just sort of showing a growing up of Android, and realizing how globally important it is," Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android, and who has been working at Google on Android software since 2007, told Business Insider.
Read more: Here are the biggest differences between Samsung's brand-new Galaxy Note 10 and the Galaxy S10
It's not just the name that differentiates Android 10 from its predecessors. While performance enhancements and user-interface improvements were among the key highlights in Android updates from the past several years, Android 10 is all about boosting personal privacy, making Android more accessible, and laying a foundation for the future.
Privacy is a particularly important theme in Android 10, as the company said the software comes with almost 50 new features focused on privacy and security. One such addition makes it possible for a user to decide to only share location data with apps while they're being used, a feature that Apple's iPhones have already offered for a while. The software will also remind users when an app is tracking their location in the background.
It's certainly a welcome improvement from the currently available privacy options, which are more important now than ever before as Google's data collection and privacy practices have come under increased scrutiny. But it also begs the question as to why Google waited so long to add more comprehensive privacy controls to Android in the first place.
According to Burke, Android was originally built with flexibility in mind, giving both device owners and app developers the freedom to create new services and customize the phone's software as they see fit. Now, the company is filling in some of the gaps in privacy that come with that flexibility.
"And I think what we've learned over the 10 or 11 years is that sometimes you can be a little too open, right?" Burke said. "And so I think we're just course correcting that a little bit."
Making Android smartphones more accessible to those living with disabilities is also a key theme of Android 10. The new software will include native support for hearing aids, which makes it possible for Android devices to seamlessly connect to hearing aids without consuming too much of your phone's battery or requiring additional software.
One of the headlining features it showcased during its Google I/O conference in May is an addition called Live Caption, which uses on-device machine learning to caption any media playing on your phone, whether it be from a podcast, video, or messaging app. Since it uses on-device technology, the captions are processed on your phone and aren't sent to remote servers. "We pipe the audio from the phone directly into an on-device speech recognizer," Burke said when explaining how the feature works. "And then in real time we can live caption anything."
That's not to say Android 10 doesn't bring the user-interface improvements that Android updates have been known for in the past. With the increasing popularity of smartphone designs with edge-to-edge screens as the industry moves away from physical buttons, Google is introducing a standardized approach to navigating with swipes and gestures rather than on-screen keys. But if you're concerned about Android 10 forcing you to re-learn how to use your smartphone, don't worry: those familiar three buttons for navigating back, home, and viewing recent apps that have been a mainstay on Android will continue to be an option.
"At the start of this year, we sat down with a lot of our device maker partners and realized that pretty much all of them were implementing gesture navigation in one way or another," said Burke. "And they were all doing it slightly different. . . And that would've been bad not just for application developers because they would have to adapt to different devices, but also to users and customers who are moving between different Android devices."
Burke consistently used the phrase "continual improvement" to describe the company's approach with Android, even dating back to the software's early days when the team initially came up with the idea to nickname Android releases after desserts.
That naming convention stemmed from the daily meeting that the Android team holds to discuss the state of the software and how the team is progressing on current projects. Ryan PC Gibson, director of technical program management at Google, was the first person to lead these meetings - and it was his idea to nickname Android software versions after desserts. "We kind of joke about how in the early days you were kind of stress eating desserts," Burke said. "And so there was sort of a connection to that."
It's perhaps fitting that Android 10 is the first software version to ditch the treat-themed branding that Google has maintained for most of Android's existence. After all, Android 10 will introduce support for forward-looking technologies that are expected to play an important role in the way our smartphones work in the future, like optimizations for 5G connectivity and foldable phone form factors. And the company is already looking at what's next for Android in 2020.
"I spent the last two days working with the team on our plans for Android 11," Burke said. "So for us, it's just we're on this continual drive to make the product better."