Android
Oreo
Oreo () (stylized as OREO) is a brand of sandwich cookie consisting of two biscuits or cookie pieces with a sweet creme filling. It was introduced by Nabisco on March 6, 1912, and through a series of corporate acquisitions, mergers and split ...
(
codenamed Android O during development) is the eighth major release and the 15th version of the
Android mobile operating system
A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on ...
. It was first released as an
alpha quality
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
developer preview in March 2017 and released to the public on August 21, 2017.
It contains a number of major features, including notification grouping,
picture-in-picture
Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a feature that can be found in television receivers, personal computers and smartphones, consisting of a video stream playing within an inset window, freeing the rest of the screen for other tasks.
For televisions, pic ...
support for video, performance improvements, and battery usage optimization, and support for
autofill
Autofill is a function found in some computer applications or programs, typically those containing forms, which prefills a field automatically and can save a user time.
A web browser's autofill feature is used to fill out forms with previously en ...
ers,
Bluetooth 5
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limit ...
, system-level integration with
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
apps, wide
color gamut
In color reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or color gamut , is a certain ''complete subset'' of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given circ ...
s, and
Wi-Fi Aware
The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit organization that owns the Wi-Fi trademark. Manufacturers may use the trademark to brand products certified for Wi-Fi
interoperability.
History
Early 802.11 products suffered from interoperability problems be ...
. Android Oreo also introduces two major platform features:
Android Go
Android Go, officially Android (Go Edition), is a stripped-down version of the Android operating system, designed for low-end and ultra-budget smartphones (but is also used by some tablets). However, it is intended for smartphones with less tha ...
– a software distribution of the operating system for low-end devices – and support for implementing a
hardware abstraction layer
Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acce ...
.
, 8.17% of Android devices ran Android Oreo, with and 5.11% on Android 8.1 (API 27) and 2.06% on Android 8.0 (API 26).
History
![Android 8](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Android_8.0_Oreo_Pixel.png)
Android Oreo was internally codenamed "Oatmeal Cookie." On March 21, 2017, Google released the first developer preview of Android "O",
available for the
Nexus 5X
The Nexus 5X (codenamed bullhead) is an Android smartphone manufactured by LG Electronics, co-developed with and marketed by Google as part of its Nexus line of flagship devices. Unveiled on September 29, 2015, it was a successor to the Nexus 5 ...
,
Nexus 6P
Nexus 6P (codenamed ''Angler'') (also known as the Nexus 6 Plus, Nexus 6 Pro or Nexus 6 Premium) is an Android smartphone developed and marketed by Google and manufactured by Huawei. It succeeded the Nexus 6 as the flagship device of the Nexus ...
,
Nexus Player
The Nexus Player is a digital media player co-developed by Google, Intel and Asus. It is the second media player in the Google Nexus family of consumer devices. Originally running the Android 5.0 ("Lollipop") operating system, it is the first d ...
,
Pixel C
The Pixel C is a 10.2-inch (260 mm) Android tablet developed and marketed by Google. The device was unveiled during a media event on September 29, 2015. On October 9, 2018, it was succeeded by the Pixel Slate.
Specifications Hardware ...
, and both Pixel smartphones. The second, considered beta quality, was released on May 17, 2017. The third developer preview was released on June 8, 2017 and offered a finalized version of the API.
DP3 finalized the release's API to API level 26,
changed the camera
UI, reverted the Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity levels in the status bar back to Wi-Fi being on the left, added themed notifications, added a battery animation in Settings: Battery, a new icon and darker background for the Clock app, and a teardrop icon shape for apps.
On July 24, 2017, a fourth developer preview was released which included the final system behaviors and the latest bug fixes and optimizations. Android "O" was officially released on August 21, 2017 under the name "
Oreo
Oreo () (stylized as OREO) is a brand of sandwich cookie consisting of two biscuits or cookie pieces with a sweet creme filling. It was introduced by Nabisco on March 6, 1912, and through a series of corporate acquisitions, mergers and split ...
". Its
lawn statue was unveiled at a promotional event across from Chelsea Market in New York City—a building which formerly housed a
Nabisco
Nabisco (, abbreviated from the earlier name National Biscuit Company) is an American manufacturer of cookies and snacks headquartered in East Hanover, New Jersey. The company is a subsidiary of Illinois-based Mondelēz International.
Nabisco's ...
factory where Oreo cookies were first produced. Factory images were made available for compatible Pixel and Nexus devices later that day. The
Sony Xperia XZ1
The Sony Xperia XZ1 is an Android smartphone manufactured and marketed by Sony. Part of the Xperia X series, the device was announced to the public along with the Xperia XZ1 Compact at the annual IFA 2017 on August 31, 2017. It is the direct su ...
and Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact were the first devices available with Oreo pre-installed.
Android 8.1 was released in December 2017 for Pixel and Nexus devices, which features minor bug fixes and user interface changes.
Features
User experience
Notifications can be snoozed, and batched into topic-based groups known as "channels". The 'Major Ongoing' feature orders the alerts by priority, pinning the most important application to the top slot. Android Oreo contains integrated support for
picture-in-picture
Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a feature that can be found in television receivers, personal computers and smartphones, consisting of a video stream playing within an inset window, freeing the rest of the screen for other tasks.
For televisions, pic ...
modes. The "Settings" app features a new design which has been reduced in size, with a white theme and deeper categorization of different settings,
while its ringtone, alarm and notification sound settings now contain an option for adding custom sounds to the list.
The Android 8.1 update supports the display of battery percentages for connected
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...
devices, makes the notification shade slightly translucent, and dims the on-screen navigation keys in order to reduce the possibility of
burn-in
Burn-in is the process by which components of a system are exercised before being placed in service (and often, before the system being completely assembled from those components). This testing process will force certain failures to occur under ...
.
Platform
Android Oreo adds support for Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN) for
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...
based on
Wi-Fi Aware
The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit organization that owns the Wi-Fi trademark. Manufacturers may use the trademark to brand products certified for Wi-Fi
interoperability.
History
Early 802.11 products suffered from interoperability problems be ...
,
Bluetooth 5
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limit ...
,
wide
color gamut
In color reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or color gamut , is a certain ''complete subset'' of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given circ ...
s in apps, an
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...
for
autofill
Autofill is a function found in some computer applications or programs, typically those containing forms, which prefills a field automatically and can save a user time.
A web browser's autofill feature is used to fill out forms with previously en ...
ers, multiprocess and
Google Browsing support for WebViews, an API to allow system-level integration for
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
apps, and launching activities on remote displays.
Android Runtime
Android Runtime (ART) is an application runtime environment used by the Android operating system. Replacing Dalvik, the process virtual machine originally used by Android, ART performs the translation of the application's bytecode into native ...
(ART) features performance improvements.
Android Oreo contains additional limits on apps' background activities in order to improve battery life. Apps can specify "adaptive icons" for differently-shaped containers specified by themes, such as circles, squares, and
squircle
A squircle is a shape intermediate between a square and a circle. There are at least two definitions of "squircle" in use, the most common of which is based on the superellipse. The word "squircle" is a portmanteau of the words "square" and "ci ...
s.
Android Oreo adds native support for
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
AAC has been stan ...
,
aptX
aptX (''apt'' stands for ''audio processing technology'') is a family of proprietary audio codec
An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In s ...
,
aptX HD and
LDAC Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...
codecs. Android Oreo supports new
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...
that were included in the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
10 standard. A new emoji font was also introduced, which notably redesigns its face figures to use a traditional circular shape, as opposed to the "blob" design that was introduced on
KitKat
Kit Kat (stylised as KitKat in various countries) is a chocolate-covered wafer bar confection created by Rowntree's of York, United Kingdom, and is now produced globally by Nestlé (which acquired Rowntree's in 1988), except in the United Stat ...
.
The underlying architecture of Android was revised so that low-level, vendor-specific code for supporting a device's hardware can be separated from the Android OS framework using a
hardware abstraction layer
Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acce ...
known as the "vendor interface". Vendor interfaces must be made
forward compatible
Forward compatibility or upward compatibility is a design characteristic that allows a system to accept input intended for a later version of itself. The concept can be applied to entire systems, electrical interface
Interface or interfacing may ...
with future versions of Android. This new architecture, called Project Treble, allows the quicker development and deployment of Android updates for devices, as vendors would only need to make the necessary modifications to their bundled software.
All devices shipping with Oreo must support a vendor interface, but this feature is optional for devices being updated to Oreo from an earlier version. The "seamless updates" system introduced in Android 7.0 was also modified to download update files directly to the system partition, rather than requiring them to be downloaded to the user partition first. This reduces storage space requirements for system updates.
Android Oreo introduces a new automatic repair system known as "Rescue Party"; if the operating system detects that core system components are persistently crashing during startup, it will automatically perform a series of escalating repair steps. If all automatic repair steps are exhausted, the device will reboot into recovery mode and offer to perform a factory reset.
The Android 8.1 update also introduces a
neural network
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
API, which is designed to "
rovideapps with hardware acceleration for on-device
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
operations." This API is designed for use with machine learning platforms such as
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...
Lite, and specialized co-processors such as the
Pixel Visual Core
The Pixel Visual Core (PVC) is a series of ARM-based system in package (SiP) image processors designed by Google. The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in futur ...
(featured in Google's
Pixel 2
The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are a pair of Android smartphones designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. They collectively serve as the successors to the Pixel and Pixel XL. They were officially announc ...
smartphones, but dormant until 8.1 is installed), but it also provides a
CPU fallback mode.
Android Go
A tailored distribution for low-end devices known as Android Go was unveiled for Oreo; it is intended for devices with 1 GB of RAM or less. This mode has platform optimizations designed to reduce mobile data usage (including enabling Data Saver mode by default), and a special suite of
Google Mobile Services
Google Mobile Services (GMS) is a collection of proprietary applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) services from Google that are typically pre-installed on Android devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. GMS ...
designed to be less resource- and bandwidth-intensive. The
Google Play Store
Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sys ...
would also highlight lightweight apps suited for these devices.
The operating system's interface is also modified, with the quick settings panel providing greater prominence to information regarding the battery, mobile data limit, and available storage, the recent apps menu using a modified layout and being limited to four apps (in order to reduce RAM consumption), and an API for allowing mobile carriers to implement data tracking and top-ups within the Android settings menu.
Google Play Services
Google Play Services is a proprietary software package produced by Google for installation on Android devices. It consists of background services and libraries for use by mobile apps running on the device When it was introduced in 2012, it pro ...
was also modularized to reduce its memory footprint.
Android Go was made available to OEMs for Android 8.1.
Security
Android Oreo re-brands multiple security features provided by Google Play Services under the blanket name "Google Play Protect", including automatic scanning of Google Play Store and sideloaded apps, and Android Device Manager—which is now branded as "Find My Device". As opposed to a single, system-wide setting for enabling the installation of apps from sources outside of the
Google Play Store
Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sys ...
, this function is now implemented as a permission that can be granted to individual apps (i.e. clients for third-party app repositories such as
Amazon Appstore
Amazon Appstore is an app store for Android-compatible platforms operated by Amazon.com Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.
The store is primarily used as the storefront for Amazon's Android-based Fire OS. including Amazon Fire tablets, a ...
and
F-Droid
F-Droid is an app store and software repository for Android, serving a similar function to the Google Play store. The main repository, hosted by the project, contains only free and open source apps. Applications can be browsed, downloaded and ...
). A verified boot now includes a "Rollback Protection" feature, which enforces a restriction on rolling back the device to a previous version of Android, aimed at preventing a potential thief from bypassing security measures by installing a previous version of the operating system that doesn't have them in place.
See also
*
Android version history
The version history of the Android mobile operating system began with the public release of the Android beta on November 5, 2007. The first commercial version, Android 1.0, was released on September 23, 2008. Android is developed by Google in w ...
*
iOS 11
iOS 11 is the iOS version history, eleventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 10. It was announced at the company's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Worldwide Developers C ...
*
macOS High Sierra
macOS High Sierra (version 10.13) is the fourteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. macOS High Sierra was announced at the WWDC 2017 on June 5, 2017 and was released on September 25, 2017. ...
*
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
*
Windows 10 Mobile
Windows 10 Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft. First released in 2015, it is a successor to Windows Phone 8.1, but was marketed by Microsoft as being an edition of its PC operating system Windows 10.
Wind ...
References
External links
*
*
{{Google Inc.
2017 software
Android (operating system)
Oreo