First, we’re changing the way we name our releases. Our engineering team has always used internal code names for each version, based off of tasty treats, or desserts, in alphabetical order. This naming tradition has become a fun part of the release each year externally, too. But we’ve heard feedback over the years that the names weren’t always understood by everyone in the global community.
[…]As a global operating system, it’s important that these names are clear and relatable for everyone in the world. So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change.
Not exactly a hugely important bit of news or anything, but there you have it – the dessert names are no more.
Yes they were pushing it. Even though Kit Kat was okay, I remember community wanting “Key Lime Pie”, and the last one “Pie” was not as good. So given there is really no well known dessert name that starts with Q, it might be right time to switch.
Found these on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queijadinha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qurabiya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Puddings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quindim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qottab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quesito
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetschentaart
Except for Qurabiya, which I would spell as “Kurabiye”, there seems to be none that I know of.
The general audience that pays for the bill doesn’t understand our private nerdy naming convention, let’s sort it out with a more conventional alternative for these simple mortals. Android 10.
No, Android 10 is neither Windows 10 nor macOS 10. Or iOS 10. And it works only on Samsung 10, not iPhone 10. No confusion possible.
Will it change ? Perhaps we’ll call it Android X.
X which stands for “XoXo cupcakes”.
Got it ?
Kochise,
I don’t think it’s a coincidence, they are all eager to highlight “version 10” or X, but none want to get to 11. The marketing types think that 10 / X is cool, hell microsoft even skipped natural numbers to get there.
Marketing insanity aside, I do think version numbers are more intuitive than desert names, I won’t miss them personally.
Android Atacama, Android Gobi, Android Kalahari, Android Mojave, …
Agreed and I also won’t miss them. I not a fan of the Debian/Toy Story character naming scheme either.
> The marketing types think that 10 / X is cool, hell Microsoft even skipped natural numbers to get there.
Marketing may have played a part, but there were technical reasons for skipping Windows 9 as well. Put simply, there’s a lot of stupid API’s on Windows that expose version numbers as strings instead of just numbers, and some poorly designed software (that MS wishes to retain backwards compatibility with) only looks at the first character of the version string instead of parsing the whole thing (and such software assumes that anything reporting ‘9’ for the version number that they parse is Windows 95 or 98). You can see the same issue in some old video games which will report the system as only having DirectX 1 when run on a system that provides DirectX 10/11/12.
ahferroin7,
I’d like to see some specific examples of that so that we may name and shame them, haha.
Actually I think it could be a myth. When you look deeper it does not actually fix the issue and GetVersionEx win32 call returns fake version numbers anyways even on windows 10 when you run older applications. This ugly hack exists whether or not they would have skipped windows 9, so I don’t think anything was technically gained by skipping 9.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-sysinfoapi-getversionexa
According to these articles it was referred to internally and externally as windows 9 until release and the name “windows 10” was done for branding and marketing purposes.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-christens-the-next-version-of-windows-as-windows-10/
https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-what-happened-to-windows-9-2014-10
I myself, have always referred to android versions by their version number, i simply didn’t remember their dessert names.
What i think was worse was when shops/manufacturers etc started referring to the android versions on their devices only by their dessert name, forcing me to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history to look up which android version they were referring to, so i think moving from the dessert names, to consistently only version numbers is distinctly a good thing.
Would have prefer the YYYY.Q or YYYY.MM naming convention, they are twice more identifiable because you can also immediately identify how much outdated they are.
The next thing we’ll see is that point versions are too complex, so they’ll follow chrome etc with rapid version increments and in six months we’ll have Android 73…
The general audience could not care less about Android versions. They want a shiny and brand new phone. Worse, the version number is hidden beneath obscure menus, so why should they care? It is and was always about nerds or journalists, and both probably do not care about the change. So unless they force phone makers to display version numbers on lock screen or at least boot screen, and let them be ashamed from their outdated release, I fail to see the point.
As a fun fact, my company once switched its internal version naming from increasing numbers to famous people names, because numbers were confusing. Then we changed to _two digit year number_._release number_._release index_, because names were confusing. And these day, nobody still understands those version numbers so I am bracing for the next change.
In the real world the dessert names are mostly used to put outdated tablets and phones on retail shelves so gullible people will buy up unwanted hardware. It’s become similar to Intel’s intentional misnaming i3′ i5, i7, various lakes scheme.
I feel like every once in a while when I look into Intel, there’s always a few new “lakes”. Sometimes new, sometimes just a `refresh`. Hard to keep track of what lake doesn’t, partially does, fully does have whatever features.