Here's our first look at Android Pie on the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus

As with most manufacturers, Samsung typically takes months to bring the latest version of Android to its flagships. Despite this and the fact that Samsung hasn’t announced when it plans to make the firmware upgrade available, XDA-Developers was able to use a tool called Firmware.Science to install Samsung Experience 10.0 based on Android 9 Pie onto the Galaxy S9 Plus.

Looking at the below screenshots of Samsung Experience 10.0, it’s pretty clear that the South Korean company is still in the alpha stage of development. Since Samsung tends to be pretty heavy-handed in its firmware changes and the fact that Android Pie was only announced a little over a month ago, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Other than all of the various changes that are introduced with Android Pie like a horizontally scrolling app switcher, Samsung Experience 10.0 appears to influence the UI heavily. Most dramatic of these changes seems to be the new card style that most elements have taken the shape of. With this, almost every item that the user will interact with will have curved corners and offer an experience closer to that found in Google’s Material Theme.

It also appears as though Samsung is going to be offering a system-wide “night theme.” It wasn’t completely working during XDA’s testing as it would constantly remain enabled, but it’s great to see OEMs like Samsung offer these types of user customizable features.

Samsung didn’t stop at just changing the UI; it also made some significant updates to the system settings. While some menu items have moved around, it looks like Samsung will be introducing its take on gesture navigation. Instead of going with Google’s design, Samsung will offer three UI elements at the bottom of the screen which represent the back, home, and recents buttons. Users will then be able to swipe up on these areas to launch the corresponding action.

Again, Samsung has yet to announce when it’ll make Android Pie available for its phones, so all of these changes are still being worked on and are far from being finished. But if you want to see more, make sure you head on over to XDA-Developers to scroll through additional images of the UI changes that the Samsung Experience 10.0 brings with it. The publication was able to grab screenshots showing how this update visually changes Samsung Messages, Bixby, Mail, Gallery, and much more.