Android 10 has a puzzle game hidden inside
If you’ve upgraded to Android 10 on your smartphone, there’s a big new feature that Google didn’t even mention, and you can access it straight away: it’s a puzzle game, hidden away in the new operating system.
Spotted by 9to5Google, this puzzle game is a little easter egg, a hidden extra on a piece of software included as a joke, maintaining the tradition of Google popping in small games or fun extras to find in the software.
It’s a little harder to access than previous years, but we can help with that.
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This particular game is a nonogram, which is a style of grid-based puzzle where you need to color in, or leave blank, squares, depending on clues in the margins. It’s also known in some areas as ‘picross’, and you may know it from branded games like Pokemon Picross or Mario Picross.
The Android 10 nonogram is quite extensive, with many levels, although we haven’t yet found out how many – enough to make the easter egg compare with a nonogram app though, that’s for sure.
If you want to play the Android 10 hidden nonogram puzzle game, this is how: the technique was originally found by 9to5Google, but we’ve followed the steps to verify it works.
How to access Android 10 easter egg game
Firstly, you’re going to have to be on Android 10 to access the easter egg, and as of writing only Pixel phones are eligible for this.
If that’s you though, you can easily update by going to Settings, System Update, then updating to the latest version.
Once you’re on Android 10, go to phone Settings, select ‘About Phone’, then press ‘Android version’ repeatedly. Now you’ll be faced with a giant ‘Android 10’ logo.
Tap repeatedly on the ‘1’ of ‘Android 10’ and it’ll rotate – you can also drag it around the screen. What you need to do now is rotate it and drag it, until it’s positioned through the ‘0’ to make a ‘Q’.
(This is something of an in-joke, as Android 10 was supposed to be called Android Q as part of the traditional Google naming ceremony, but was switched to be named 10 to fit in with the search giant’s plans to make the new operating system versions a little easier to understand.)
Now press the Android logo once more, and the nonogram game will launch. It’s a game that starts on quite high difficulty, but when you work out how to play, it becomes incredibly logical – even more so that the visual answers to the puzzles are all Android-related images.
There is a bug in the game, and it’s that while traditionally nonograms have clues along the top and left side of the grid, the Android 10 game is too big, so you can only actually see either the top or left clues at once. Rotate the screen to see the other batch.
However, it’s an intriguing game to get as part of the main operating system – so go forth and find it (if you’re a Pixel user that upgrades your OS the second a new version lands…).
Via 9to5Google
Source:: TechRadar Portable Devices
