An advantage of having a Pixel phone is that I got the upgrade to Android 10 on the release day. I checked a few times at work if it was available, but it wasn’t until it was close to quitting time. I installed it and stayed a little later than I otherwise would’ve: There was plenty to do anyway. And I’m glad I got it at work, because the download was about a gigabyte.
I haven’t played with it a lot yet, but there hasn’t been a lot different that I’ve noticed. There’ve been several cosmetic things, like a lock icon on the top of the lock screen and rings around the folders on the home screen. The dark mode has much more significant coverage of the UI and is darker.
There’s a gesture system option that’s sort of in place of the bottom bar, going much farther than the one Pie introduced. I’m giving it a chance, but so far I don’t really like it. It makes it harder to get to the app switcher view, this swipe up and hold gesture that’s easy to miss and do another gesture. Really, it makes most actions harder. It does give a bit more screen real estate, and it has a nice screen edge swipe gesture to go back, sort of like iOS. The latter is the main reason I want to give the mode more of a try, but it has its problems. It doesn’t have a forward corollary on the other side of the screen. It can be hard to activate sometimes. I got stuck in an AMP carousel that loaded several articles I didn’t want to read. And some apps have their own edge swipe functionality. We’ll see how I like it and if it improves.