It Was Sweet While It Lasted: Android Announce New Branding and the Death of Desserts

It ends with Pie.

The Android team has announced a rebrand. Along with a new logo and brand colours, the Google team has done away with the convention of naming their releases after desserts and candy. Maybe Q was just too much of a challenge to give a sweet-themed name, but according to Android the decision comes from being a well-known and global brand.

Android Police report that Google have made the big change for inclusivity. They are a global brand and so far their naming convention has been particularly Americanised. Even here in the UK, Froyo isn’t much more than a brand seen on US TV shows, so it does make sense that someone in the non-Western world can’t necessarily relate to Eclairs in the same way as the executives at Google intended.

The Versions of Android to Pie

For those who haven’t memorised every Android release name, here’s all of them so far – maybe it’ll help in a pub trivia round one day:

• 1.0 – known as Astroid by the Android team that was really not used widely and not given a dessert name
• 1.5 Cupcake
• 1.6 Donut
• 2.0-1 Eclair
• 2.2 Froyo
• 2.3 Gingerbread
• 3.0-2 Honeycomb
• 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 4.1-3 Jelly Bean
• 4.4 KitKat
• 5.0-1 Lollipop
• 6.0 Marshmallow
• 7.0-1 Nougat
• 8.0-1 Oreo
• 9.0 Pie

It will be sad to see this honoured naming tradition die a death with Android 10, which would’ve been a Q-named dessert. Even if the Android team had discovered a fantastic sweet name with which to market this latest iteration, they’d have only run into more trouble with the later part of the alphabet. And, with a letter-based system, you’re going to run out of initials to use – you’re limited by 26 versions.

The time is right, perhaps, for this change to happen. Starting a new numbering system at 10 makes sense, and getting out at Q makes even more. Nostalgically, I will look back fondly on the days when a new release would be announced, accompanied by its own giant dessert reproduction on the Google HQ lawn. It was such a successful PR stunt that people often would make a visit to have their photo taken with the Android sculptures. I can’t imagine that replacing the statues with a giant number 10 to sit in their lobby will have the same effect, but their new branding is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. New colours, styles, and a sleek modern logo will reinvigorate a brand that truly doesn’t need an overhaul.

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