Android 10 is officially named Android Q; Google quits sweet naming tradition
Goggle has named the type of Android that will be released in this Fall. It is called as Android 10….
Goggle has named the type of Android that will be released in this Fall. It is called as Android 10.
Google has announced that Android Q will now come with an all-new, rather boring name: Android 10. This bucks the trend of Android operating systems being named after sweet foods, and marks a change in the naming direction going forward.
Aude Gandon, global brand director for Android says, Alongside the new name is an updated logo for Android, one that has a “more modern” wordmark. Importantly, it will always include the little green robot.
Gandon says that the changes were important to make the wordmark more accessible and readable — especially on smaller screens. “In all honesty, when we did the acid test of doing it in really small spaces [like a screen or phone boxes], the current lettering was really a challenge,” she says. Most importantly, the wordmark is no longer green; it’s black, which makes it much more readable in more contexts.
“The robot is what makes Android special. It makes it human, fun, and approachable,” Gandon says.
Google’s Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android explains the reasons for changing the name.
“We’re going to deal with that skepticism,” he says. Google’s actual reason for switching the naming, he says, isn’t that Q is hard, but rather that desserts aren’t very inclusive. “We have some good names, but in each and every case they leave a part of the world out,” he argues. Android is a global brand, used by more people in India and Brazil than in the US, so going with an English word for the dessert leaves some regions out.
The Android 10 naming change brings with it an aesthetic change to Android’s branding, putting the Android mascot front and center, and introducing a more green-centric color scheme too. Google says it’s going to start using this design over its various apps and services in the weeks leading up to Android 10’s release and beyond that.
Pie isn’t always a dessert, “lollipop” can be hard to pronounce in some regions, and “marshmallows aren’t really a thing in a lot of places,” Samat says. Numbers, at least, are universal.
As for what the Q in Android Q actually stands for, Google will never publicly say. However, Samat did hint that it came up in our conversation about the new naming scheme. A lot of Qs were tossed around, but my money is on Quince. While the official name of Android will just be Android 10, that isn’t stopping the Android team from creating internal codenames in alphabetical order. Samat tells me that Google’s engineers have already chosen the word they’ll use internally for Android R.
Google will still make the traditional Android statue of the robot, but it’ll be of the number 10 instead of a dessert.
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