Yesterday Sony announced the devices that they plan on providing an update to Android Marshmallow to in the coming weeks and months. Now the company has opened up beta testing of Marshmallow to 10,000 Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact owners. The news comes from Sony’s blog and is going to be strictly limited to these devices and the first 10,000 users who sign up and meet the criteria.
Like many of you who have Nexus devices, I have spent this past week putting the release build of Android Marshmallow through its paces. As I noted in my review of Android Marshmallow, I’ve had it up and running on one of my Nexus 6 for the past few weeks with the Preview 3 and now running it on my daily driver Nexus 6 and my Nexus 7 tablet. One of the key features that I mentioned in my review was Doze and App Standby. In Android Marshmallow, when your device is sitting idle, the OS will shut down apps to a very lower power state but will stay alive enough for you to get updates and notifications. When you pick your device back up, everything comes back to life as normal and you won’t have any lag or delay when you open up an app. This is the Doze part of the equation. What makes this really impressive is Marshmallow learns your habits and the apps that you use most and which ones you don’t so much. On these apps it dramatically restricts the amount of power used by the apps for maximum battery efficiency. This is the App Standby functionality.
I have spent the last couple of nights testing the Doze functionality and the results are dramatic. This could well prove to be the killer feature of the release and based on what others are reporting, I’m not along in the battery savings I’m seeing on my devices.
[UPDATE] This is why I love the Android community. After posting this, several people responded over on Google+ that this is indeed a feature, not a bug. In fact the team over at Droid Life reported on this back in May… and I just missed it.
Like many of you who have Nexus devices, I’ve upgraded both my Nexus 6 and my Nexus 7 (2013) to Android Marshmallow and so far I’ve been pretty pleased (let me know how it has gone for you by taking my site poll). However I have noted a strange behavior with the Notification Drawer and my Nexus 7. Before I go through the bug report process I want to see if anyone else has seen this behavior and I reserve the right to get smarter: Did I miss a feature in Marshmallow that would cause this behavior? Further, for you Nexus 9 owners, are you seeing the same thing too?
Android Marshmallow has been with us for about 24 hours now with the Factory Images being released yesterday and the OTA updates trickling out to more Nexus devices as we speak. So now it is time to start telling me how your experience with the upgrade and performance Marshmallow has been for you.
Click here to read my review of Android Marshmallow
I’ve put together a simple poll for readers and would like to see how your experience has been with Android Marshmallow so far.
While the news of Android Marshmallow has been dominating things these past few weeks, that doesn’t mean that Android Lollipop is dead by any means. Google has updated their Developer Dashboard and the latest figures through October 5th, just yesterday, indicates that Android Lollipop is seeing its highest install base ever at 23.5%. These numbers come from Google and represent the version of Android run on devices that signed into the Google Play Store over the course of the past 7 days. While it is by no means complete or 100% accurate, it does give a good indicator of just where the Android install base is currently.
As I like to often say, living the future is pretty cool and thanks to Google, it’s about to get even more cool. On the Android Developer Blog, Google has posted that starting next week, for those of you who have Google Translate and are running Android Marshmallow, they will begin offering in-app translation for apps that have been configured to support the feature. The feature is one that could be very handy for those who want to read reviews or other user generated content without having to go out of the app and into Google Translate. It works seamlessly on the backed.
If you have been on any Android centric website then undoubtedly you have seen the Android Marshmallow (or previously the Android Lollipop) icon wallpaper. This is where you have the Marshmallow logo laid over your current wallpaper on your Android device. If you have ever wondered how that icon is found, it’s actually easy and it is in every Android device. The even better news is that it is quite literally only a few taps away on your device.
While a lot of announcements around Android Marshmallow has been from a manufacture perspective, for those who are locked in to particular carriers the bigger question is if that carrier will provide (translate: allow) the update to hit the devices on their network. For their part at least, T-Mobile is address this for their customers. Today they have updated their Software Tracking Page that allows you to see at what phase of testing and deployment the Android Marshmallow update is coming to their devices.
This list is includes devices that have already had the update ready and are rolling out, most notably the Nexus devices, while other devices like the HTC One M9 state that “T-Mobile and the manufacture have agreed to support a new software update”