If you have a Huawei you may have noticed that Android Pie (9) system update has been rolling out with Huawei’s new EMUI 9, and not just to their newer models. We’ve seen updates to older models such as the Huawei P10. With that said, let’s keep this short and see what’s new in Android 9.
Some new features in Android Pie
We won’t go into a great amount of detail until we’ve fully tested everything but there is a re-organization of the notification area: network connections are now on the left and there are maybe a few less icons displayed. Some other new features include Improved Notifications and Adaptive Brightness. Adaptive Brightness is supposed to employ some AI that keeps track of your preferred settings. It’s still too new to really go into detail, but it sounds promising, at least from a user experience perspective.
Power Management on Android Pie
The Power Management algorithms have reportedly been re-worked in collaboration with Deep Mind to help prioritize battery usage amongst various apps and features. Some users have been reporting worse battery usage in Android 9 so maybe this requires further tweaking and testing. We haven’t noticed any difference yet, although we just upgraded mere hours ago.
What is Feature Advisor?
This thing is a little weird. After updating my P20 to Android Pie I noticed a notification called Feature Advisor that seemed to always pop up and hang around on the lock screen that says “FeatureAdvisor is running“. This is specific to Huawei and the update to EMUI version 9.0.1. There really isn’t much information about this application but you can disable it from within Settings-Notifications. It’s not clear if it is a drain on the battery or not although it does appear at first glance to be innocuous. We’ll keep an eye on it.