Summary
- The Pixel 10 has made an appearance in AOSP.
- A code change hints at potential startup speed improvements.
- The extent of the impact is unclear.
The Pixel 10’s been leaking this month. We’ve seen renders that show designs extremely similar to last year’s Pixel 9 phones, plus specs for the Tensor G5 chip that’ll power Google’s new devices. Now, as spotted by Mishaal Rahman, a code change in AOSP mentions the Pixel 10, and promises a performance boost in one specific area.
Writing for Android Authority, Rahman describes the code change, which is listed under the name Parallel Module Loading: Add performance mode. In the entry, a Google engineer mentions that the change resulted in a 30 percent reduction in “loading time.” The change isn’t specific to Google’s next-gen phones; the engineer also mentions a 25 percent reduction in loading time for the Pixel Fold.
In this context, loading time refers to one specific part of Android’s initialization process — essentially, the code change speeds up a portion of the boot-up process. Rahman points out that because the 30 and 25 percent figures are about only a single part of a multi-stage process, it doesn’t mean that your phone will turn on 30 percent faster than it did before. It’s unclear how big the change will actually be in practice, and Rahman even leaves room for the possibility that the difference could be imperceptible to users.
A change that may or may not matter
The most interesting part of this code change is that it explicitly refers to the Pixel 10, which, as best we can tell, makes it the first public-facing acknowledgment that that phone exists at all. That was hardly a secret, but it’s still noteworthy that Googlers are testing code changes on the new hardware already.
Rahman expects the code change to eventually impact all Android devices once it reaches Android’s open-source codebase, which he estimates could happen in a future quarterly release for Android 16.
