The latest release of Android is here! Introducing the Android 9 Pie. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, Android 9 aims to make your phone even smarter by learning from you and adapting to your usage patterns. It comes with features like Adaptive Battery, which learns the apps you use most and prioritizes battery for them, and Adaptive Brightness, which learns how you like to set the brightness in different settings, and does it for you.
Android 9 also helps you get things done faster with App Actions, which predicts what you’ll want to do next based on your context and displays that action right on your phone. There is also a new system navigation featuring a single home button on the Pie. As phones become more taller in shapes, a single clean home button will allow you to swipe easily with just one hand. Android Pie also brings a redesigned Quick Settings, a better way to take and edit screenshots, simplified volume controls, an easier way to manage notifications and more.
To maintain the time we spend on our smartphones, Digital Wellbeing, a new Dashboard helps you understand how you’re spending time on your device. There is an App Timer that lets you set time limits on apps and grays out the icon on your home screen when the time is up. The new Do Not Disturb silences all the visual interruptions that pop up on your screen. Wind Down switches on Night Light and Do Not Disturb and fades the screen to grayscale before bedtime.
Digital Wellbeing will officially launch on Pixel phones this fall, with Android One and other devices coming later this year. But these features are available in beta now for Pixel phones running Android 9. To try them out:
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Make sure you’re running Android 9 Pie on your device.
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Sign up for the beta with the email address you use with Google Play.
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Accept your invitation to become a beta tester by clicking the link in your welcome email.
Once you’ve accepted your invitation, Digital Wellbeing will appear in your phone’s Settings app. It may take up to 24 hours for Digital Wellbeing to appear on your device.
In addition to strengthen the security platform, Android 9 enables industry-leading hardware security capabilities to allow protecting sensitive data like credit card information using a secure, dedicated chip. Android 9 also brings important privacy improvements, such as TLS by default and DNS over TLS to help protect all web communications and keep them private.
Starting today, an over-the-air update to Android 9 will begin rolling out to Pixel phones. And devices that participated in the Beta program from Sony Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Essential, as well as all qualifying Android One devices, will receive this update by the end of this fall. We’re also working with a number of other partners to launch or upgrade devices to Android 9 this year.
