Android Q features Face ID, app updates rollback, and background location access

The ball has started to roll for Android Q development and more than its dessert name, Android users are, of course, more curious about the new features it would bring. And while it's too early in the development process to set anything into stone, some of the features gleaned from the AOSP version of Android Q do make us long for the future. Presuming all these make it to the final version, of course.

Android Q source just landed in public git repositories so, naturally, developers have been having a field day tearing it apart to see what has changed. Most are for the better though there are some that might leave you scratching your head, either in confusion or worry.

One new feature spotted by the keen folks over at XDA comes from references to a still unnamed facial recognition system. While Face Unlock and Trusted Face have long been available on Android, not only are they old but they're also nowhere in the same league as Apple's Face ID. But in the strings for Android Q, it seems that the platform will be making room for facial recognition secure enough to be used even for making payments.

One thing that's not yet certain but would definitely make users' lives easier is the ability to downgrade apps or rollback to the previous version. This would help solve cases where developers push a broken update or users want to revert to a previous version that still had their favorite features intact. That said, it might be limited to apps installed by first-party app stores.

Not all the changes Android Q will bring seem to be for the better. We've already heard about how the next Android release will give carriers more power to lock down phones to their network. Now it also seems that Android Q will again let apps running in the background get location access. Google earlier removed this ability to prevent apps from spying on users but also crippled valid uses of location access. We'll have to see in the final release how Google plans on balancing these two opposing but valid cases.