Android 10 is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldable and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology.
Innovation and new experiences
Foldables - Building on robust multi-window support, Android 10 extends multitasking across app windows and provides screen continuity to maintain your app state as the device folds or unfolds. For details on how to optimize your apps for foldables, see the developer guide.
5G networks promise to deliver consistently faster speeds and lower latency, and Android 10 adds platform support for 5G and extends existing APIs to help you take advantage of these enhancements. You can use connectivity APIs to detect if the device has a high bandwidth connection and check whether the connection is metered. With these, your apps and games can tailor rich, immersive experiences to users over 5G.
Live Caption automatically captions media playing on users’ devices, from videos to podcasts and audio messages, across any app. The ML speech models run right on the phone, and no audio stream ever leaves the device. For developers, Live Caption is optional, but expands the audience for your apps and games by making your content more accessible with a single tap. Live Caption is coming to Pixel devices this fall, and Team are working closely with partners to launch it broadly on devices running Android 10.
Smart Reply in notifications - Android 10 uses on-device ML to suggest contextual actions in notifications, such as smart replies for messages or opening a map for an address in the notification. Team has built this feature with user privacy in mind, keeping the ML processing completely on the device. Your apps can take advantage of this feature right away, or you can opt-out if you’d rather generate your own suggestions.
Dark theme - Android 10 adds a system-wide dark theme that’s ideal for low light and helps save battery. You can build a custom dark theme for your app or let the system create one dynamically from your current theme. See the developer guide for details.
Gesture navigation - Android 10 introduces a fully gesture navigation mode that eliminates the navigation bar area and allows apps to use the full screen to deliver richer, more immersive experiences. Get started optimizing your app today.
Privacy for users
Giving users more control over location data - Users have more control over their location data through a new permission option -- they can now allow an app to access location only while the app is actually in use (running in the foreground). For most apps this provides a sufficient level of access, while for users it’s a big improvement in transparency and control. To learn more about location changes, see the developer guide or blog post.
Protecting location data in network scans - Most of the APIs for scanning networks already required the coarse location permission. Android 10 increases the protection around those APIs by requiring the fine location permission instead.
Preventing device tracking - Apps can no longer access non-resettable device identifiers that could be used for tracking, including device IMEI, serial number, and similar identifiers. The device's MAC address is also randomized when connected to Wi-Fi networks by default. Read the best practices to help you choose the right identifiers for your use case, and see the details here.
Securing user data in external storage - Android 10 introduces a number of changes to give users more control over files in external storage and the app data within them. Apps can store their own files in their private sandboxes, but must use MediaStore to access shared media files and use the system file picker to access shared files in the new Downloads collection. Learn more here.
Blocking unwanted interruptions - Android 10 prevents app launches from the background that unexpectedly jump into the foreground and take over focus from another app. Learn more here.
Security
Storage encryption - All compatible devices launching with Android 10 are required to encrypt user data, and to make this more efficient, Android 10 includes Adiantum, new encryption mode.
TLS 1.3 by default - Android 10 also enables TLS 1.3 by default, a major revision to the TLS standard with performance benefits and enhanced security.
Platform hardening - Android 10 also includes hardening for several security-critical areas of the platform, and updates to the BiometricPrompt framework with robust support for face and fingerprint in both implicit and explicit authentication. Read more about Android 10 security updates here.
Camera and media
Dynamic depth for photos - Apps can now request a Dynamic Depth image, which consists of a JPEG, XMP metadata related to depth related elements, and a depth and confidence map embedded in the same file. These let you offer specialized blurs and bokeh options in your app. Dynamic Depth is an open format for the ecosystem and Team are working with partners to bring it to devices running Android 10 and later.
Audio playback capture - Now any app that plays audio can let other apps capture its audio stream using a new audio playback capture API. In addition to enabling captioning and subtitles, the API lets you support popular use-cases like live-streaming games. Team has built this new capability with privacy and copyright protection in mind, so the ability for an app to capture another app's audio is constrained. Read more in blog post.
New audio and video codecs - Android 10 adds support for the open source video codec AV1, which allows media providers to stream high quality video content to Android devices using less bandwidth. In addition, Android 10 supports audio encoding using Opus - an open, royalty-free codec optimized for speech and music streaming, and HDR10+ for high dynamic range video on devices that support it.
Native MIDI API - For apps that perform their audio processing in C++, Android 10 introduces a native MIDI API to communicate with MIDI devices through the NDK. This API allows MIDI data to be retrieved inside an audio callback using a non-blocking read, enabling low latency processing of MIDI messages. Give it a try with the sample app and source code here.
Vulkan everywhere - Vulkan 1.1 is now a requirement on all 64-bit devices running Android 10 and higher, and a recommendation for all 32-bit devices. Team already see significant momentum on Vulkan support in the ecosystem - among devices running Android N or above, over half support Vulkan 1.0.3 or better. With the new requirement in Android 10, Team expect to see adoption rise even further in the coming year.
Connectivity
Improved peer-to-peer and internet connectivity - Team has refactored the Wi-Fi stack to improve privacy and performance, and also to improve common use-cases like managing IoT devices and suggesting internet connections -- without requiring the location permission. The network connection APIs make it easier to manage IoT devices over local Wi-Fi, for peer-to-peer functions like configuring, downloading, or printing. The network suggestion APIs let apps surface preferred Wi-Fi networks to the user for internet connectivity.
Wi-Fi performance modes - Apps can now request adaptive Wi-Fi by enabling high performance and low latency modes. These can be a great benefit where low latency is important to the user experience, such as real-time gaming, active voice calls, and similar use-cases. The platform works with the device firmware to meet the requirement with the lowest power consumption.
Android foundations
ART optimizations - Improvements in the ART runtime help your apps start faster, consume less memory, and run smoother -- without requiring any work from you. ART profiles delivered by Google Play let ART pre-compile parts of your app even before it's run. At runtime, Generational Garbage Collection makes garbage collection more efficient in terms of time and CPU, reduces jank, and helps apps run better on lower-end devices.
Neural Networks API 1.2 - Team has added 60 new operations including ARGMAX, ARGMIN, quantized LSTM, alongside a range of performance optimizations. This lays the foundation for accelerating a much greater range of models -- such as those for object detection and image segmentation. Team are working with hardware vendors and popular machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow to optimize and roll out support for NNAPI 1.2.
Faster updates, fresher code
With Android 10 Team are continuing focus on bringing the new platform to devices more rapidly, working closely with device-makers and silicon partners like Qualcomm. Project Treble has played a key role, helping us bring 18 partner devices into this year’s Beta program along with 8 Pixel devices -- more than double the number from last year. Even better, Team expect those devices to get the official Android 10 update by the end of this year, and Team are working with several partners on other new flagship launches and updates. Team are seeing great momentum with Android 10 already, and more devices than any other previous Android release will be getting this new version in the months ahead.
Android 10 is also the first release to support Project Mainline (officially called Google Play system updates), new technology for securing Android users and keeping their devices fresh with important code changes - direct from Google Play. With Google Play system updates, Team are able to update specific internal components across all devices running Android 10 and higher, without requiring a full system update from the device manufacturer. Team are expecting to bring the first updates to consumer devices over the next several months.
For developers, Team expect these updates in Android 10 to help drive consistency of platform implementation broadly across devices, and over time bring greater uniformity that will reduce your development and testing costs.
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