Some early builds of what appeared to be Beta 5 have been circulating for the last week or so, with a few folks seemingly getting it ahead of schedule. From those reports, a handful of features and subtle tweaks in Android Q were spotted. While at least one of those features is present in the latest official Android Q Beta 5 release, many of them are not.

The new Assistant animation and corner brackets are present in Android Q Beta 5 (at least, on our Pixel 3a), but the notification pull-down gesture in the Pixel Launcher, navigation restrictions for third-party launchers, and the "back sensitivity" gesture setting are missing. The black boot animation expected in Beta 5 is present for some devices, like the Pixel 3, but is missing from others.

With Google stating in its announcement today that the navigation restrictions will actually arrive in Beta 6, it's possible that these earlier releases contained some features actually intended for Beta 6 — though they could also be dogfood releases with a mix of Beta 5 and Beta 6, or builds containing features and changes that may never see the light of day. The "QP1A" prefix and August security patches included in one of the builds mentioned on reddit a week ago were a curiosity at the time, and this would seem to explain it: It wasn't actually Beta 5.

We'll be updating our prior coverage on still-missing features to clarify these details. In the meantime, if you were looking forward to anything specific that showed up in one of the early builds seen in the last week, temper your expectations as we work through the changes.