Google has officially named the next version of Android, which is due to be released this fall: Android 10. Breaking the 10-year history of naming releases after desserts, the company is bailing on providing a codename beginning with a subsequent letter of the alphabet in this case, Q, which is the way we’ve been referring to Android up to now. In a blog post, Google said it’s changing the way it names its releases altogether in a push for greater accessibility. “We’ve heard feedback over the years that the names weren’t always understood by everyone in the global community,” the company wrote.
The Google engineering team has traditionally used internal code names based off of tasty treats but added that they’ve “heard feedback over the years that the names weren’t always understood by everyone in the global community.”
To make Android more universally acceptable, the next version of Android will simply use its version number – in this case, Android 10. The next version will be Android 11, and so on. How exciting.
While not a huge deal, abandoning the original scheme feels like a misstep. Google’s playful naming convention was a break from the norm and many would make a game of trying to predict the next name to be used. Google even licensed a couple of brand names with KitKat and Oreo. My guess is that when they hit the letter Q, they ran out of ideas. Indeed, can you think of a single common treat that starts with the letter Q?
In addition to changing the way it names Android versions, Google has also updated the mobile platform’s logo. It changed the text from green to black to make it easier to read, switched fonts and used a close-up of the Android robot that’s now colored in a new shade of green.
