First screenshots, now video: Here’s Android Pie on the Galaxy S9

We recently wrote about some Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus Android Pie screenshots that XDA Developers got its hands on. These were taken from a leaked build of the yet-to-be-released firmware, giving us a glimpse of what we can expect from Samsung Experience 10.0 (based on Android 9.0 Pie) when it’s released. Yesterday, XDA took this a step further with a full video walkthrough of the new software.

The eighteen-minute video goes over the main points of the new interface. This software is running on the Galaxy S9, rather than the S9 Plus, and it differs slightly from the screenshots previously seen (it seems like a later build but it’s not completely clear).

In Experience 10.0, you’ll notice additions like the large menu headers — spaces at the top of the screen that might include the menu name or something else relevant to that particular page. You see this first in the video around 2:25 and it’s an interesting design choice; I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, other than that it doesn’t seem like an efficient use of the space.

You’ll also see Samsung‘s heavy use of the full-length bubble icons in menu items. These sometimes contain several lines of information, while others are just a single line, and each bubble is separated by a small blank space (check it out around 10:15). The idea behind this probably to make it easier to pinpoint specific items rather than just see a text wall — the same way my line breaks do in this post — which is a reasonable idea.

If you’ve got a recent Android phone, you’ll probably already be familiar with these bubbles from the notification shade too, but I’m not sure how people will feel about its implementation everywhere. It looks like overkill at the moment and, interestingly, it seems to be everywhere but the notification shade on Experience 10.0.

Meanwhile, the UI’s dark mode aesthetic may also change before the final software rollout, though the video host believes it may remain in the settings menu.

Samsung is still working on the UI on the final Android 9.0 Pie build for the Galaxy S9, so aspects of the software may change between now and then. This serves as a nice taster, though, so I recommend watching the whole video if you’re waiting for it on your Samsung phone.

As for when the final software will be released, we can’t say for sure. Typically, Samsung doesn’t update its Galaxy S series phones until the year after Google releases new software (which would mean 2019 for the S9 and S9 Plus). As Samsung’s new phones support Project Treble, and the software seems to be well into development, however, it could be much sooner this time around.

What do you guys think of how the Galaxy S9’s Android Pie build is shaping up? Let me know in the comments.