Android 10 is official and as of this writing it’s only available on a very small number of phones: Pixels and a few others. I’ll have a review up later today, but here’s a quick preview: it’s good, does a better job of protecting your privacy, but none of that matters if you can’t get a phone that runs it.
It’s difficult to maintain a sense of outrage over Android’s atrocious track record of providing upgrades to users year after year. We’re at the tenth version, after all, and the story on upgrades is the same today as it was a decade ago: first-party Google devices get updated quickly, everything else takes months or doesn’t get updated at all.
That’s all important, but it’s not what people want. They want the big updates. Yet the Android ecosystem seems designed to keep major OS updates from getting prepped and delivered to users. That’s because it is. And since this situation hasn’t changed in a decade, there’s an incontrovertible conclusion to draw:
Google can’t fix it. No one can.
