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We asked, you told us: Force rotation button is Android Pie's underdog feature

In this week's poll, we asked about your favorite underrated feature in Android Pie.
By
August 11, 2018
Android 9 Pie review App Shortcuts notificationsAndroid 9 Pie review App Shortcuts notifications

This week, we asked you about your favorite little Android Pie feature. We’re not talking about the big stuff like gesture navigation or Digital Wellbeing — we’re talking about the little tweaks that don’t normally make the headlines.

We included six of our favorite underrated features in the poll:

  • Force-rotate button in the navigation bar
  • Weather/battery info in the always-on display
  • Text selection magnifier when highlighting text
  • Simplified Do Not Disturb mode
  • HEIF image support
  • Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT)

Personally, my favorite little feature is the addition of weather and battery information on the Pixel 2‘s always-on display. Google’s AoD implementation was pretty basic when the Pixel 2 first came out. Now it’s super easy to get the information you need without unlocking the phone.

But what did Android Authority readers vote for? Let’s take a look:

Out of over 1,200 total votes this week (we didn’t post this on our social networks which is why the numbers are so low), about 33 percent of voters said their favorite underrated Pie feature is the force-rotate button in the navigation bar. Coming in at a close second with 24 percent of the votes is weather/battery info on the lock screen.

Finally, third place goes to the handy text magnifier for highlighted text feature with 14 percent of the votes.

That doesn’t tell the full story though. Here’s what some of you had to say in the comments:

Other favorite Android Pie features

  • The fact that the icons in settings have different colours. I had this a long time ago using the PopUI theme way back with Cyanogen Mod 12. Glad to see Android has finally caught up.
  • Finally a dark theme in stock Android! FINALLY!

Android Pie features you’re not thrilled about

  • Just to share my least favorite and that is switching the default volume rocker to media instead of ring sound/volume with absolutely no way to switch it. how it worked before, defaulting to media when in an app that has media, was perfect. now I have to go into settings just to change it. horrible.
  • Anyone else notice a problem with Pixel XL, 9.0, and Calendar notifications? If I’m on the latest version of Calendar, I don’t get notifications… But if I uninstall all updates, everything is fine…

The poor folks who own a Samsung phone…

  • I’ll have to wait a couple of years to talk about 9.0 because i have a Samsung…

It looks like many of you are quite satisfied with this update, and others aren’t so much. Feel free to keep the Android Pie talks going in the comment section below.