Google Releases Android 10 (Go Edition) for Low-End Handsets

Google announced today that it is releasing the latest version of Android Go, its solution for low-end handsets.

“In many places in the world, entry-level smartphones are often the first and only way people get access to the internet,” Google’s Sagar Kamdar explains. “As we build Android for everyone, making sure that these devices are affordable and high quality is a top priority. That’s why we launched Android (Go edition) in 2018—a platform tailored for smartphones with 1.5GB of memory or less.

For Android 10 (Go edition), Google is making the following changes.

Faster. Google says that apps will launch 10 percent faster than with the previous version.

More secure. Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption called Adiantum that Google built specifically for entry-level smartphones. Now, all entry-level smartphones can encrypt data without impacting device performance.

New app experiences. Google Go now provides an AI-powered read-out-loud feature, plus a Lens feature that can read and translate the text that you point at with your camera. YouTube Go has less buffering while streaming videos, helping users save on data consumption. And the new Gallery Go by Google Photos app makes it easier to find photos on an entry-level phone; it’s just 10 MB in size but works offline and is still powered by on-device machine learning so that it can automatically organize photos by the people and things you take photos of.

According to Google, Android (Go edition) has been supported by over 500 hardware makers which have launched over 1600 devices in the past 18 months to countries like India, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States. Android Go is running on about 80 percent of entry-level Android phones that are being activated today, it says.