So Android 6.0 Marshmallow started rolling out to Nexus devices this week, officially as of last Monday, and I've spent basically every day since compulsively checking Settings > About Phone > System Updates on my Nexus 6 like its going to change something by staring at it. It hasn't. Still says I'm on Lollipop. My buddy Dev got his on a Nexus 5 two days ago and has not stopped texting me screenshots of it since, which, fine, I'm happy for him, but also I hate this specific kind of happy for him.
This is the annoying part of the Nexus program that nobody puts in the marketing copy. You buy the "pure Google" phone specifically so you're first in line for updates, and then Google still staggers the rollout in batches over days or weeks because apparently pushing an OS update to everyone at once will melt something at Mountain View. I get why they do it (carrier variants, regional stuff, catching bugs before they hit millions of phones at once) but knowing why doesn't make the waiting less dumb.
Anyway, from what I've read and what Dev's shown me, the actual update looks genuinely good, not just an incremental bump. The permissions model is the big one. Instead of Android making you accept one giant wall of permissions at install time, take-it-or-leave-it, apps now ask you for things as you actually use them, the way iOS has done forever. Camera app wants your location the first time you try to geotag a photo, not the moment you install it. This is such an obvious improvement that it's a little embarrassing it took this long, but I'll take it.
Doze is the other one I actually care about. It's a battery mode that kicks in automatically when your phone's been sitting still and unplugged for a while (like overnight on your nightstand) and cuts back background activity way more aggressively than before. Google's own numbers claimed something like double the standby time in testing, which I'm always skeptical of because manufacturer battery claims are basically fiction as a genre, but even half of that would be a real difference. My Nexus 6 currently loses something like 15-20% overnight just sitting there doing nothing, which is absurd for a phone that's supposedly asleep.
Now on Tap is the feature getting the most demo-video attention and I'm the most lukewarm on it. You hold the home button and it scans whatever's on your screen (a text, an email, whatever) and surfaces contextual info from Google. Somebody texts you a restaurant name, you tap and hold, it pulls up hours and a map without you leaving the app. Neat in a demo. In real life I suspect I'll use it maybe twice, forget it exists, and rediscover it accidentally in like March. Still, credit where due, at least it's Google shipping something it demoed at I/O back in May actually being close to on schedule for once.
Worth remembering too that this whole release is basically the software half of a launch that already happened a couple weeks back with the Nexus 5X and 6P hardware. Feels like the actual event where they showed those phones off was ages ago at this point, and now the OS that was supposed to ship alongside them is finally trickling down to the older Nexus lineup. That gap between "here's the shiny hardware" and "okay now the software everyone else gets too" always bugs me a little. Nexus Imprint, the new fingerprint API baked into Marshmallow, is only useful to people with the new phones that actually have a sensor, so my Nexus 6 gets the software layer with none of the hardware to use it, which is its own small joke.
I'll update this post or just do a new one once mine actually lands, assuming it lands before I lose my mind refreshing the update screen. If you're on a Nexus 5, 6, 7 (2013), 9, or Player and it hasn't shown up yet, apparently you can sideload the factory image yourself if you're impatient enough to risk wiping your phone over an OS update, which, no. I've bricked a phone doing that exact thing once, back in like 2013, and I am not doing that again over Now on Tap.