Google officially released Android 10 back in Septembe 3 and as usual, the Pixel phones get it first. These updates get seeded to flagships most of the time and it is rare for a mid range phone to get it.
Huawei had announced that they will seed Android 10 to the Huawei Y9 Prime so I was patiently waiting for the update.
Well, the update finally seeded this weekend and it is glorious.
First of all, the update wasn’t immediately available on the update section of the settings up. I had to navigate to the HiCare app which somehow triggered the download to the main update section.
The weird update system aside, the download and install process went smoothly. In an hour, I had Android 10 running well on my Huawei Y9 Prime 2019. The interesting bit is that this OS change only came with the November 2019 security update. I was expecting it to come with the January patch or at least the December patch.
The first thing that I noticed was the revamped user interface. Huawei removed the app switcher in favour of a swipe up gesture to launch the apps drawer. There is a system wide dark mode switch under display settings which is now natively supported in Android 10.
The swipe to reveal notification bar has a cleaner look. The notifications look much better now and you can see the progress bar while playing music on Apple Music.
The Settings app has been rearranged where some options have been removed from deep settings and has better colours. Thanks to the system wide dark mode, Huawei’s first party apps have dark mode. Health for example looks so much better in dark mode.
The camera interface has also been revamped on the Y9 Prime 2019. They have gone for a flatter look and so far, I haven’t noticed any new features on the camera app.
There are some caveats to upgrading to Android 10. One of my apps (Nat Mobile) is not working presumably due to the new OS. I hope they rectify that issue sooner rather than later.
The Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 getting Android 10 still solidifies my opinion that it is one of the best budget phones you can buy right now. For roughly Kshs 23,000, you can get a phone with the underrated Kirin 710F processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage and now runs Android 10.
