The Galaxy S21 Ultra costs $1,199. The iPhone 13 Pro Max costs $1,099. The Pixel 6 Pro running Android 12 costs $899, and its software is more interesting than either of them. Material You — Android’s first genuinely personal design language — doesn’t care about your phone’s price. It pulls colors from your wallpaper and paints the entire OS in your palette. No two Android 12 phones look the same, and that’s a bigger deal than any spec sheet suggests.
Android 11: Complete Guide to Features, Release Date, API Level & History
If you bought a Pixel in 2020, you did it during a pandemic, during a US presidential election, during a year when Google’s hardware ambitions looked shakier than ever. The Pixel 5 wasn’t a flagship — it was a mid-range phone with a flagship price that Google positioned as “what matters, at a price that makes sense.” Android 11 had to carry that narrative, and surprisingly, it did.
Android 10: Complete Guide to Features, Release Date, API Level & History
I’ve covered Android since the G1 in 2008, and I’ve never seen a release generate more pre-launch controversy over a name than Android 10. Google killed the dessert codenames — no Quince Tart, no Queen Cake, no publicly-branded “Q” pastry at all. Just “Android 10,” with a new wordmark and a bugdroid head in the logo. The brand that spent a decade charming the world with alphabetical sweets had decided it was time to grow up.
Android 9 Pie: Complete Guide to Features, Release Date, API Level & History
Everyone’s nostalgic for Nougat — the cat-collecting easter egg, the Pixel’s unlimited photo backup, the last Android before “gestures ruined everything.” But nostalgia lies. Android 9 Pie was braver than any Android release in years. It killed the three-button navigation bar that had defined Android since 2008. It baked Digital Wellbeing into the OS when critics were calling smartphone addiction a public health crisis. And it used on-device AI to manage your battery in ways Doze never could.