From new gestures to extending battery life, here's everything you need to know about Android Pie!
Following last year's Oreo release, 2018 is the year of Android 9 Pie.
Google's latest flavor of Android is jam-packed with all sorts of new features, including a brand-new gesture navigation system, new UI elements, and a heap of under-the-hood tweaks that aim to make this the best version of Android to date.
Without further ado, here's everything you need to know about Pie!
The latest Android Pie news
December 28, 2018 — Adoptable storage is missing with Samsung's final Pie update
Just before Samsung's open beta of its One UI/Pie update was released, one of the most exciting things we saw was the addition of adoptable storage in a leaked build of the new software — something Samsung phones have been missing since the feature's introduction back in 2015. Adoptable storage wasn't actually functional during the beta, but we expected that this would change once the final build of Pie started rolling out to Samsung devices.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
As noted by SamMobile, Samsung's final and official Pie update doesn't show any sign of adoptable storage anywhere at all.
My guess is that it'll be added at some point down the road since it's apparent that it's something Samsung is working on, but maybe the feature wasn't ready for primetime quite yet.
November 13, 2018 — Samsung phones may finally get adoptable storage with Android Pie
Back in 2015 with the release of Android Marshmallow, one of the highlight features was the introduction of adoptable storage — the ability to choose if you want to use Micro SD cards as extra phone storage or portable storage. It's proven to be extremely helpful over the years, but for whatever reason, Samsung phones have never supported it.
The folks at SamMobile recently got their hands on an early build of Android Pie for the Note 9, and as you can see from the screenshots above, adoptable storage is finally enabled.
Adoptable storage doesn't actually work in this early build, but it's expected that it'll be fully functional once the final release comes about in January.
All the big details
Android P is officially Android 9 Pie
No Popsicles or Pineapples here. On August 6, 2018, Google revealed that its next version of Android is Android 9 Pie.
Along with the name change, the number this year is also slightly different. Rather than following the trend of 7.0, 8.0, etc., Pie is referred to as 9. This probably doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it's still an interesting move on Google's part.
Every new Android version builds upon the previous one, meaning that each new update is better than the last.
However, in day-to-day use, how does really Pie hold up? What's it like using the new gestures instead of the traditional navigation buttons? How do the subtle UI tweaks compare to Oreo? What's performance like?
