Google Pixel March 2020 Update is Out

 Hi everyone,

Today the Android March 2020 update came out along with a feature drop for the Google pixel devices now this is out – all supported Google pixel devices starting with the Google pixel - 2 XL and going all the way to the 4 and 4 XL it’s also available usually for the essential phones the same day and then Samsung and other manufacturers will roll it out to their own devices soon now there’s a feature drop that goes along with this so I’m going to go over all the new features and then go over all the updates along with the security bulletins and things like that.

Now I had to side load this so this was about 1 and a half to 2 gigabytes because it wasn’t showing up but you’ll see it says up-to-date version 10 March 5th 2020 so this is completely up to date even though it’s not March 5th yet and that’s how they do it and here is the build number you’ll see on my pixel 4 XL its QQ - a dot two zero three zero five dot zero three and in this particular update is a huge amount of security updates fixes improvements all sorts of things so let’s start with the first one and the first one has to do with something they actually showed in the Android 11 preview and that is if playing this song there’s now a new gesture on the pixel 4 and for Excel to pause the song now it doesn’t seem to work completely for me it worked on.

Android 11 but it’s not working here and you do have to turn it on in gestures so you’ll see as I bring my hand close its not turning the song off but if I go into the features and gestures here you’ll see that I have gestures available to pause music and so if I go into this its turned on and you just bring your hand close by tapping to resume it or pause it and again like I said it’s not really working properly but it is something that’s there so I’m not sure why that’s not working but it’s not at this time now the next thing they’ve updated is car crash detection it rolls out for the pixel for in Australia in the UK it’s also in the United States so if you go into the personal safety app here you’ll see that you can turn on car crash detection so.

It will turn it on you can say try a demo and then says see and hear what happens when your phone detects a car crash make sure your volume is up so you’ll see well turn it up a little bit well hit start and it says detected and then you can hit I’m okay or 911 Oh crash minor crash so it’s kind of neat it’s a nice safety feature and if you want to use it it’s there so that’s nice that they’ve added it now if you use Google duo there’s some new effects that they’ve added for AR or augmented reality so let’s go into duo effects and I can have a little cat sitting on my head we’ve got Scooby-doo you’ve got a little phone here so there’s some new effects here. 

As well all sorts of things that you can add and it tracks your face really well they’re kind of goofy but they work pretty well and they’re there if you want to use them so those have been added now they’ve also updated the forward-facing camera on the pixel 4 4 XL and what they’ve done is added depth to it so second to process and now there’s some depth in the background so they’ve improved this made it a lot better and it should be working even better than it was before now if you’re on a pixel 2 in to excel there’s good news you get live captions so if you’re using video and watching video you can enable live captioning so that’s a new feature and then they’ve added new emoji from the Unicode 12.1 release so that means. 

If we go into messages you’ll see I have a few here but you have a pilot a fireman an astronaut and then you have all sorts of different genders and things there’s a hundred and sixty nine new emoji so they’ve added that they’ve added jobs and all sorts of things so those are added Ill link Unicode in the description if you want to check them all out but there are a ton of new emoji that’s brought them up to speed there will be more new emoji the second half of the year but this brings them up to the first half to match up with Unicode 12.1 now if you’re using Google pay and the wallet you can enable a quick press of the home button to bring up your cards so if you press and hold you’ll have access to your cards your credit.

Cards and any other card you add so maybe you want to add cards such as Starbucks or maybe you want to even add a pass for say a flight that you’re taking you can actually take a picture of it and add it to the wallet now as well so you have all of these different options and you just press and hold the power button you do have to enable that as well though now a lot of people love dark modes so if we go into our settings go to display in styles and go to dark theme well tap on that and we can turn it on until sunrise now or turn it off until sunset we have scheduling options now and this was something we saw with the Android 11 preview as well but they’ve brought it here to Android 10 with the latest pixel update and then there’s also new automation rules for Wi-Fi networks and this allows you to basically set a rule. 

So well go back here well go to rules and what we can do is add a rule and then we can automatically have it change to say Do Not Disturb or set the phone to silent based off the Wi-Fi network that you’re connecting to so that’s a feature they’ve added so you can just add a network say set to set the vibrate set to ring or whatever based off not only location but based off your Wi-Fi network now there’s a feature that hasn’t fully rolled out yet for the pixel feature drum and that is a not only a long press for an icon but a firm press so if you firm press sort of like 3d touch on iOS you’ve got new tasks but if I firm press it really doesn’t do anything different. 

You can long press and get the same results so threes supposedly something else coming out that’s going to be a firm press and finally for the feature drop the pixel for and for excel screens that are set to use adaptive brightness and I’m currently on manual because I don’t want it to go brighter when I’m under these bright lights for this video but under manual if you have this on automatic instead what it will do is actually go super-bright now if you’re outside in direct sunlight so it should make the screen even easier to see so that’ll be really nice for some of those that were experiencing kind of a dim screen on the floor and for excel now that’s it for the feature drop but there are a ton of fixes and improvements as well.  

So let’s go over those now as far as the fixes and improvements Ill mention all of them but if they’re specific to a device I’ll say the device specifically otherwise it pertains to all the devices that are supported by this update so the first one is in apps there’s a fix for certain app overlay elements stuck on the home screen so if you had overlays not showing properly that should be fixed now in audio you can now disable now playing for music when you’re playing it on a cast device so maybe you’re playing music on a device you’re casting to it will now have the ability to disable now playing. 

If you want to do that they’ve also fixed static noise during audio capture so maybe you’re using your phone to record audio in a classroom if there was static that should now be fixed and specific to the pixel for not the for Excel there’s improvements to the bottom speaker driver so if you have a four in the bottom speaker wasn’t working well it should be better now for all devices again there’s improvements for Bluetooth connectivity with specific or certain fitness tracking devices so if you’re having issues maybe with a Fit bit or something like that it should be better there’s also quite a few improvements to cameras on not just the pixel form for Excel but other devices as well the first one is improvements to autofocus in the camera.

So if you’re using the camera on your phone on any pixel device the autofocus should be improved if that supports this update then on the pixel 4 and for excel there’s a fix for the camera crashing that when switching to video mode so if you’re switching from say camera to video it should fix that there’s also a fix for cameras auto white balance in certain scenarios so that’s specific to the pixel 4 and 4x elegant and if it wasn’t auto white balancing properly it should be improved now when it comes to connectivity using USB specifically on the pixel 4 and for excel it fixes an issue with unrecognized UX USB accessories so those should be fixed and then they’ve improved face unlock on the pixel 4 and 4 XL as well and its only issues where it gets stuck so the first one is they fixed an issue or get stuck on the lock screen after the device is unlocked with a face so maybe unlocks.

And its stuck on the lock screen now well go to the home screen properly and they’ve also fixed an issue for incorrect text translation in settings so maybe you have face unlock settings turn on the might not have shown the proper translation in those settings that should be improved as well now as far as motion sense on the pixel foreign for excel they’ve improved visual feedback for motion sense gestures so again if I go in I’ll just play this here and with this song playing if I move my hand it should go to the next song now my motion gestures are not working the alarm worked fine this morning when I swipe my hand in front of it but for some reason the most motion that gestures are not working properly on this device.

Hopefully they fix that as well or improves in the future now there are a lot of fixes to the system that you can’t see behind the scenes to kernel updates and things like that but I’ll talk more about that with the security updates but there’s actual fixes to the system kernel as well so there’s three fixes for that they’re basically specific for each pixel device so there’s fixes for the two and two XL three a three a Exile three XL three four for itself now there’s also improvements to the overall system user interface so switching with gesture navigation so the animation switching between things they’ve actually improved the animation and then they’ve also clarified the dark-themed helper text in settings.

So they’ve changed it in settings where we go to display and again to the dark theme there’s different text here so it’s just a little bit more clear so all these little tweaks they’re really fixing a lot of things now they’ve also fixed with telephony undo scribble location access notifications after an emergency call so specifically you’d have to place an emergency call with your dialer and its fixed issues with that they’ve also fixed a few video issues for all of the devices this one in particular though is for the pixel three XL 3 3 a 3 a XL when you’re doing video playback in certain apps when using picture and picture mode so not on this device. 

But if you have a pixel 3 3 at those devices it should be fixed in they’ve also improved 4k video playback on all of the devices they’ve also fixed corrupted video playback in certain apps after locking the screen and then they’ve also fixed Wi-Fi so lost Wi-Fi network configurations I actually had that happen on my pixel 4x oh I think in the last version the Wi-Fi connection just disappeared and now its fixed and those are all of the different fixes and improvements with this update so lots of different things and then finally there are a ton of security patches as well and I’ll just run down through these pretty quickly now as far as the framework there are four different security patches there’s seven patches to the media framework 24 to system one to the Google Play system updates 28 kernel components have been its patched security-wise FPC components there’s six of those.

There’s one mediate component 12 QUALCOMM components and then 42 Qualcomm closed source security components all of those patches are in the updates on this current March 20 2016 5 seen since maybe Android 10 was released so lots of things in there now battery overall there’s no mention of changes to that and this device usually does pretty well I can get through a day on battery and you’ll see my battery here let me get into the usage there my battery here I haven’t used it a ton today I’ve been busy recording other videos and then speed and performance I’ve never had an issue on the pixel 4 or 4 XL I find I only have to reboot it rarely and in fact this has not been rebooted since I did the Android 11 update and then flashed it back to the pixel security updates so that was last week or so when I did that so it’s been on I haven’t rebooted it and its been doing really well so in general its working well. 

I’m looking forward to more updates like this and all of those features are great to see added to the pixel lineup so let me know if you had that already added I actually had to side load the update like I said but if you have the pixel feature drop let me know all of those things should be there except maybe a couple that the firm press for example there’s just nothing really there other than that it should be updated now if you found anything else new let me know in the comments below and if you’d like to get your hands on this wallpaper of course Ill link it in the description as I always do if you haven’t subscribed already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I’ll see you next time.