First impressions of Android Q

THE GOOD

The Dark theme

A warm welcome for all of our bespectacled users and concerned parents. No longer do users have to squint their eyes while checking the time in the middle of the night. The system-wide dark theme lets the user opt out of the all-white backgrounds and choose a more mellow theme while saving battery-life to boot as it doesn't just turn things dark, they're completely turned off.

Customising location services 

This helpful feature is a big bump for privacy. Every app will send a subtle reminder, regardless of developer, whether the app is recording the user's location. Contrary to remaining in a state of paranoia, users can know for sure which apps are keeping track of your whereabouts. No more third-party calculators recording your frequent trips to Burger King, unless you want it to.

Live captions

Subtitles. For. Everything. Even your own videos recorded in your phone, if you choose to mute your audio, the software will try its best decipher the audio and provide your subtitles. In the 3rd beta, when we tested it, it wasn't completely accurate however, hopefully by the final version, with a little polishing this could be quite helpful for users with hearing based disabilities.

THE BAD

Swiped out 

The new update added swiping features which use the edges of your screen to swipe backwards on an app. As much as this feature reduces screen-clutter, it can be problematic for phones that use sidebars as a built in feature. They added another swipe feature for multitasking, which has been difficult to grasp as it is messy and sometimes unresponsive.

File mismanagement

There's a new privacy feature that makes it so that all the data from your apps is saved in separate folder for that app. Though this may provide a sense of relief that no malicious apps can access your personal information, it can still manage to break file management system and make things messier than organised.

Fatality

The most important setback is the way this update might slightly kill your phone. Some brands, for example the One Plus, is susceptible to problem ranging from hangs to full system shutdowns when running this update. The cause for this is still unclear, but one thing is for sure, users should make a secure back up.

The new update does bring much needed and very important features which can't help but make users excited for what's to come. However, the setbacks make it an unfavourable choice for now. It would be best to avoid the update for now. If the fourth manages to fix a few discrepancies, then the future for android is very bright, or dark, to save battery life.