While the latest version of Android is slowly making its way to smartphones and tablets in all price segments (even Go edition users haven’t been left behind), it has been a no-show on the television front.
That is changing with Google’s announcement yesterday that Android 10 was finally available for its TV platform, Android TV.
Launched 5 years ago, Android TV has been Google’s assault on the living room as the reach of its popular mobile platform goes beyond the palms of our hands onto our wrists (WearOS), our car dashboards (AndroidAuto, for the few with means) and, of course, the living room through Android TV and Android Things.
This, the company has acknowledged by releasing interesting feature updates over the last few months.
Whereas most of us who are after all the crispiness of not just the overall picture quality that the makers of our TVs assure us of getting but also of the user interface will be happy with the redesigned Google Play Store that has been rolling out, users on tight budgets and not-so-reliable data connections will appreciate the data-saving features that are now built right into Android TV.
It remains to be seen how fast Android 10 will make it to existing TV sets given that some of the most notable Android TV partners, like Xiaomi, are still trialling Android 10’s predecessor, Android 9 Pie, on their televisions with no set timeline for when it will be getting to users.
At its annual developer conference back in May, Google projected that at least 60% of televisions on the Android TV platform will be running on Android 8, Oreo, a 2-year-old operating system, by the end of the year. At the time, at least 80% of TV sets on the platform were powered by 3-year-old Android 7, Nougat.
A few weeks to Google I/O 2019, we learned that Android TV’s app numbers had surged to at least 5,000, up from just over 3,000 the year before.
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