Google announces Android 9 Pie, powered by AI for a smarter experience
Google’s latest release of Android is here and it comes with artificial intelligence baked in to make your phone smarter, simpler and more tailored to you. Google has built Android 9 to learn from you—and work better for you—the more you use it.
Android 9 aims to make your phone even smarter by learning from you and adapting to your usage patterns. Android 9 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.
Later this fall, Google will also roll out Slices which shows relevant information from your apps when you need it. If you start typing “Lyft” into Google Search, you’ll see a “slice” of the Lyft app, showing prices for your ride home and the ETA for a driver so you can take action more quickly and easily.
In Android 9, Google has introduced a new system navigation featuring a single home button. This is especially helpful as phones grow taller and it’s more difficult to get things done on your phone with one hand. With a single, clean home button, you can swipe up to see a newly designed Overview, the spot where at a glance you have full-screen previews of your recently used apps.
Swipe up from anywhere to see full-screen previews of recently used apps and simply tap to jump back into one of them. If you find yourself constantly switching between apps on your Pixel, Smart Text Selection (which recognizes the meaning of the text you’re selecting and suggests relevant actions) now works on the Overview of your recent apps, making it easier to perform the action you want. You can enable this new system navigation in Settings once you’ve received your update to Android 9
Android P 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. You’ll notice small changes like these across the platform, to help make the things you do all the time easier than ever.
Google has been working to add key capabilities right into Android to help people achieve the balance with the technology they’re looking for.
At Google I/O in May, Google previewed some of these digital wellbeing features for Android, including a new Dashboard that helps you understand how you’re spending time on your device; an App Timer that lets you set time limits on apps and greys out the icon on your home screen when the time is up; the new Do Not Disturb, which silences all the visual interruptions that pop up on your screen; and Wind Down, which switches on Night Light and Do Not Disturb and fades the screen to greyscale 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.
In addition to continuously hardening the platform, and an improved security model for biometrics, 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.
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. Google is also working with a number of other partners to launch or upgrade devices to Android 9 this year.
