Android 10 Q beta review

On-device Google Assistant

The Google Assistant made its debut on the original Pixel phones in 2016, and since then it's grown into the best virtual assistant there is. On its third anniversary, a massive update is coming, but we have to warn you, Google said this is launching on the Pixel 4 phones first. So like the original rollout of the Assistant, it might be limited to the upcoming Pixels for a while, until the company is ready for a rollout across all Android devices.

The big news is that the Assistant will be fully contained on your phone, so it will no longer send your queries to the Google servers to interpret your speech. The company has managed to develop completely new speech recognition and language understanding models that don't need the cloud to function anymore because they take up as little as half a gigabyte of space. Hence, these will live on your handset, replacing the 100GB models that the company has so far been using in the cloud.

This means the new Assistant will process requests with near-zero latency since there's no waiting around for the round-trip the data makes to the cloud and back. So its answers should feel much more like they are part of a natural conversation - Google says it will reply up to ten times faster than before. And of course, since it's all on-device, it will understand your query even when there's no internet connection - although the lack of connectivity will still prevent it from showing you results on the web.

Bluetooth settings revamp, Find My Accessories

In an un-streamed talk at its developer conference, Google detailed a few Bluetooth-related improvements coming to Android Q, but which aren't part of the current beta release. The company is going to cater more to truly wireless earbuds, which makes sense considering how popular these are becoming.

When you open or close their charging case, you'll get a notification showing the remaining battery life for each earbud, as well as the case itself. The Bluetooth settings page will be redesigned too and will show you the same three-tier battery stats if you have truly wireless earbuds connected. On the same page you'll be able to manage Assistant and notification settings for your accessories, change touch controls, control audio tuning, and toggle in-ear detection on and off.

Additionally, if you have an accessory that is Fast Pair enabled, you can locate it on a map which will show you where it was when it last disconnected. This will take you to the Find My Device app, now expanded to also cover headphones. Once you're there, you can see the connection quality, the last time of use, and quickly unpair an accessory if you need to.

Fast Pair is part of Google Play Services and works with all Android 6.0+ devices connected to accessories with the A2DP or HFP profiles. It's meant to replicate Apple's 'magic' fast pairing functionality that it has built into its own brand and Beats headphones to make pairing a less involved process than usual. If you have Fast Pair enabled headphones and use Android, you'll get a Tap to Pair notification on your phone once you turn them on.

Google is working on supporting many more devices through Fast Pair by the end of the year. More Bluetooth profiles should be added, as well as support for Bluetooth Low Energy devices such as smartwatches.

Live Caption

Live Caption was announced on stage at Google I/O, and its name is very descriptive. Thanks to the new on-device machine learning capability and audio playback capture API, you'll get support for live captions of any media right on your phone, with no internet connection required.

It will automatically caption media playing on your device - videos, podcasts, audio messages, you name it - across any app. It even works with stuff you record yourself. As soon as speech is detected, captions will just automagically appear. The captions and audio never leave your phone. This is going to be helpful for the deaf and hard of hearing people, 466 million across the world, according to Google's numbers. But it will also help those who watch video without sound out of privacy reasons.

Digital Wellbeing: Focus Mode and upgrades to Family Link

Last year Google launched its Digital Wellbeing suite, that gets its own top-level placement in Settings but rather confusingly isn't updated at the same time as Android. Its beta got launched after Pie dropped, and was opt-in for Pixels. This year Digital Wellbeing will receive a new Focus Mode, which will be available to Pixels but also other Android handsets running Android 9 Pie or Q.

Focus Mode's name is pretty self-explanatory. Once you activate it, the apps you have pre-selected as being distracting will no longer be able to show you notifications - until you decide to come out of Focus Mode, of course.

Google's Family Link set of parental controls will be accessible through Settings on every handset that runs Q and has the Digital Wellbeing suite, and these two will share a top-level Settings slot because they're philosophically connected.

The company is also expanding its parental controls to add top requested features such as giving your kids bonus time for phone usage before bed, and the ability to set app-specific time limits for them.

A further improvement to the Digital Wellbeing suite, coming with updates to both itself and the default Pixel Launcher, means you'll be able to quickly 'pause' apps by long-tapping their icons on a home screen. An additional option will show up when you do that, and when you hit the hourglass that app will be paused for the remainder of the day, so you won't be able to use it until the clock strikes midnight. This complements Digital Wellbeing's ability to add app timers per day, so you are only allowed to use a specific app for whatever amount of time you set. The point of all this is to help with distractions, but obviously, whether you use app timers or app pausing is entirely up to you. It will be interesting to see if third-party launchers will follow the Pixel Launcher's lead and support quick app pausing too.

A key thing to note here is that Digital Wellbeing doesn't seem to be part of the core Android OS Google offers to third-party manufacturers, so whether it will ever make it to your particular smartphone remains to be seen. So far, some companies that are known for offering a pretty stock-like Android experience, like OnePlus, haven't adopted Google's Digital Wellbeing, instead of being inspired to develop their own takes on the concept (Zen Mode, anyone?). Since Google is being very vague about it, we can't even infer whether this is meant as an exclusive for Pixels, but perhaps time will tell.

What’s in an (Android) name?

Clearly not a feature per se, this - or is it? Since Android 1.5 Cupcake Google's use of dessert names for every new big release of its mobile OS has become part of mobile world folklore, with anxious anticipation for every year's announcement of what the new one is. This time around the company's choices are severely limited, however. Quick: think of a dessert that starts with the letter Q! No, quiche is not a dessert.

So while Google works on cracking this tough nut, may we suggest Android 10 Queen of Puddings? Android 10 Queijadinha? Android 10 Qurabiya? Android 10 Quindim? Most of those will be pretty interesting to hear said out loud on a stage somewhere.

Final note here: "Android 10" sounds very big and anniversary and all that, but the actual release that will be called that doesn't really stand out very much. There are many improvements, for sure, as well as some new features added, but clearly, this is an iterative year for Google's mobile software efforts, and not one that "changes everything," as Apple would say.