Untested Features

[IMANUT46]

I read 2 articles this morning explaining 2 features I never knew existed.

One was a series of codes that is entered from the Dialer, that provides shortcuts to many functions. The other is a claim that on Pixel Devices, updates can be installed IN THE BACKGROUND, so you can continue to work while the update installs. Some of my previous updates took almost an hour.
I tried to attach the files, but for some reason it failed.
I know that without the source documents, a meaningful response is limited.. Any thoughts on this would be helpful.

 

[B. Diddy]

Hidden menus are nothing new, and are essentially for developer use or troubleshooting by a technician. They vary among phones and manufacturers: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-secret-codes/. It's best not to tinker with these.

On Pixels (and any other phone that has dual A/B partitions for seamless updates), system updates are more or less done in the background, so that you can continue to do whatever you need to do while this is happening. You may notice that when you agree to an update, it'll start downloading, and then for a while it'll be optimizing apps -- while this is happening, you can still switch away from the update screen and do other things. When the phone asks you to restart, there will be a somewhat longer boot process than normal, but much shorter than phones that don't have seamless updates (those phones will often take several minutes to boot during an update, while a Pixel should just take less than a minute on the boot screen). When the lockscreen shows up, you can unlock the phone and use the phone as usual -- but during this time, the phone is actually still finishing up the update (which you can tell because there will be an Android icon representing that system version in the status bar). this takes another minute or so, but you can still use the phone.

 

[IMANUT46]

Thank very much. I never knew that was possible. I was always fearful that if I didn't just stare at the process, not touching the screen, I would screw something up.
Thanks again.