One of the best things about Google's Pixel phones is getting prompt updates. Today was the official release of Android 12 (and new Pixel phones), and I updated my phone to the new version of Android this evening.
The update took a bit more than half an hour and proceeded with no issues. When the phone rebooted I had my familiar home screen layout with only a couple of minor changes. I did have to wait a bit for my weather channel and Google Fit widgets to come back to life but they eventually did.
Google has been hyping the new "Material You" design. My reaction is generally "meh". There's a new theming engine that picks up the colours from your wallpaper and new icon designs for things like the Phone and Contacts apps. I use a pure black background as my wallpaper so Google picked light grey accent colour on darker gray for its colours, which was kind of ugly and hard to read. I changed the accent colour to light green instead. I'd prefer a wider choice of colours but I can live with it.
Initially, the biggest change I noticed was with the Quick Settings screen. Rather than icons, the new design uses oval buttons with small icons and text. I prefer the old layout as it gets more on-screen in a smaller space. The addition of device controls to Quick Settings is a nice change. To go along with that, long-pressing the power off button brings up a panel with just four choices: Emergency, Lockdownm, Power Off, and Restart.
There are some major changes to how notifications are handled. I haven't looked at them in detail yet, but what I've seen so far seems logical.
It's hard to be sure but performance seems to be a little zippier and my battery life may be somewhat better. Also, I seem to have a few GB more of storage than I did before the update.
I'm not going to go into more detail on new features. There are many easy-to-find articles on the web for that. Also, some of the new features are only available on the new Pixel 6 phones.
So to wrap up, I'm happy with the upgrade, but it's not life-changing.
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