Android 6.0 review: useful home screen features, permissions system works well, SD cards now as good as internal storage, but apps can opt-out of power saving
Android 6.0 Marshmallow, thoroughly reviewed — Marshmallow brings a lot of user-requested features but still has no update solution.
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands the same day Google begins rolling Marshmallow out to the Nexus 5, 6, 7 (2013), 9, and Player, closing the loop opened by August's naming and SDK preview release. The verdict is split: the user-requested feature list — runtime permissions, home screen additions, SD cards treated as internal storage — finally ships, while the decade-old structural complaint, that Android has no update solution, goes unanswered again.
The opt-out hole in the power-saving system matters because it hands control back to exactly the apps the feature was meant to constrain, and it sets the template for how later releases get judged: the Huawei P9 review shows how quickly an Android 6.0 base gets buried under an Emotion UI skin, and the Android 16 review a decade later is still scoring shipped features against ones promised for later.
First-order effects
- Nexus owners on the five rollout devices get runtime permissions and adoptable SD storage immediately, changing how every newly installed app requests access.
- App developers face a compliance fork: adapt to the granular permission prompts or lose install confidence, while apps that exercise the power-saving opt-out blunt Doze-style battery gains for their users.
Second-order effects
- OEMs like Huawei take the 6.0 base and re-skin it heavily, so the reviewed experience diverges from what most buyers actually get — the P9's Emotion UI hinders usability on top of the same core release.
- Battery-hungry apps gain a documented escape hatch from power management, pushing the burden of endurance back onto users who must find and revoke opt-outs manually.
Third-order effects
- The persistent lack of an update mechanism means each release's quality is filtered through carrier and manufacturer pipelines, so Google's platform improvements reach users unevenly regardless of how well they review.
- If every version ships with deferred features and an unresolved update story, Android reviews converge on a standing scorecard — shipped-now versus promised-later — that spans from this review through Android 16.
The trend: Android's annual release cadence keeps shipping well-reviewed user-facing features while the update-delivery problem and OEM skinning ensure the platform experience fragments faster than Google consolidates it.