Android 8.0 Oreo, released on August 21, is slowly starting to gain momentum in the market. Every year, the largest mobile operating systems (including iOS) receive updates that, albeit slightly, make the process of using a smartphone more comfortable. The release of Android 8.0 was indeed highly anticipated by many, although most of its features were leaked long before the official release. But there were disputes regarding the name until the very day of the presentation, but in the end we got the expected version of Oreo, named after the famous cookie. Today we'd like to discuss what's new in Android 8.0 and take a look at the list of devices that will receive the update.
Interface and design
The design of Android has not undergone any significant changes - it is still the same Lollipop with some modifications. For example, Google redesigned the quick settings curtain and the settings menu. Now everything is done in white and gray tones, the settings are grouped, and the side menu is no longer there. The quick settings curtain also became gray, and the date information, the “Edit” button and the settings icon moved to the bottom.
I was pleasantly surprised by the new animation when opening the notification curtain when there are several notifications.
Method No. 2 - changing the device firmware
Poking around in the factory software of your smartphone always carries the risk of losing all device data. Before flashing your device, you need to unlock its bootloader. Luckily, you can easily save all your data by following a simple backup procedure. Go to your device settings and select “Backup and reset”. To save photos and videos taken with the camera, connect the device to the computer in flash drive mode and copy the files from the folder called “DCIM”. Another option is to use the Google Photos service.
Become a developer
It's time to become a developer, and luckily your smartphone won't notice if you're not actually one. Go to the "about phone" section and scroll down to where the "build number" is listed. Click that checkbox seven times and you can magically “become a developer.” Thanks to the provided permissions, a new option “developer options” will appear in the previous menu. Click on it.
Make sure you have OEM Unlocking and USB Debugging enabled. This will allow you to unlock the bootloader using a simple command (more information below) and the smartphone will be able to receive files from the PC. After making these settings, you are ready to boot the OS image.
Notification channels
Notification channels give you the ability to customize notifications for each action. For example, like and subscribe on Instagram are two different notifications. You can remove some of them, you can install different sounds, and so on. By the way, now there are a huge number of notifications that are simply unnecessary. For example, when chatting on Facebook Messenger, you will see notifications that cannot be brushed away.
Long press widgets
The situation with widgets is similar - it doesn’t work on the Nexus 6P. The point of the function is that the user can quickly add a new widget to the home screen without having to “wander” for a long time through the list of widgets. Just long press on the Gmail icon and you can see and select any desired widget from the email client.
Download the ADB installer
This simple application will install all the necessary files so that your PC can communicate with your smartphone and send the new Android Oreo software to it. Download the application and launch it. A window will appear asking if you want to install ADB and Fastboot. To consent to installation, enter Y on your keyboard. Press Y again when asked if you want to install an application for the system and if device drivers need to be installed. In a new window, allow the driver installation process to begin. At the end of the installation, you will need to restart your PC. The program will be located at C:\adb (if C:\ is the system drive).
Now it's time to connect your smartphone to your PC (if you haven't already done so).
Picture-in-picture (YouTube Red, Chrome)
Picture-in-Picture mode has generated a lot of buzz, but it's of little practical use since it doesn't work without a YouTube Red subscription. You can bypass the limitation by adding a corresponding button to the navigation bar. Previously, this could be done using the System UI Tuner, but Google later removed this feature. It's worth noting that you can minimize videos viewed through Chrome without any problems, but first you need to open them in full screen and then press the Home button.
Don't forget that besides YouTube, there are other applications that will soon receive support for Picture-in-Picture mode. This will be very convenient in video chats. Already now, in Google Duo you can simultaneously talk with someone and, for example, correspond in messenger. In this case, the caller's image will be displayed in some corner of the screen.
Download and install APK
If earlier installer files were downloaded in the same way as any others, and applications were installed and worked without problems, now this process has changed somewhat. First, in order to download an APK, the program will need to be given special permission. Secondly, it will be possible to give applications installed from APK full access (GPS, Bluetooth, etc.) only by removing restrictions in the settings.
Autofill in apps
Any modern user knows that entering hundreds of passwords a day in each application is a real pain. Google understands this, which is why they introduced the autocomplete feature. With the user's permission, the system will fill in the login and password fields automatically based on previous logins and saved passwords in Google Chrome. Interestingly, with some banking clients, autofill worked in the latest beta version, but after updating to release it stopped working. Apparently, we will have to wait until the developers adapt their software.
Android O or 8.0 will be ready in the fall
The beta version of Android O, available for current Pixel models and Nexus 5X and 6P smartphones, works quite stable. However, it is not worth using it everywhere yet. We positively assessed the innovations, but some of them still seem not very convenient and look a little small on smartphone screens.
Google releases the final version in the third quarter (August or September). Major mobile phone manufacturers will install Android 8 in those flagships from the end of 2022, for which a support period of 18 to 24 months will be provided after the initial release.
Many mid-segment models and former flagships, as usual, “fly past” updates. After all, before Android smartphones are capable of the same flexible updates as Windows PCs, Google still has a lot of work to do. First of all, this concerns the clarification of the usual OS code names based on the names of desserts. You can see “Oreo” in the tweets, the year before there was “Nutella”, and version 7 was dubbed “Nougat”. It is better not to fall for the jokes of Google jokers.
Smart text selection
The copy and paste function has been present in all devices for about 8 years, and it would seem that there is nothing to improve there? However, Google engineers have a different opinion. The new Android recognizes what information you're copying and makes suggestions accordingly. Double-click on the phone number. The smartphone will highlight it and immediately offer to go to the Phone application. The same thing happens with the address and company names.
Improved targeting for low RAM devices
The Android 8.1 update adds two new hardware function constants to the package manager - FEATURE_RAM_LOW and FEATURE_RAM_NORMAL. These constants allow you to target application distribution and separate APK files for devices with normal and low RAM.
Thanks to FEATURE_RAM_LOW and FEATURE_RAM_NORMAL, the Google Play store will learn to highlight applications depending on the capabilities of user devices. In this way, Google plans to promote the best content that will suit everyone - no matter how much RAM the device has.
Responsive Icons
Manufacturers of Android smartphones often use icons of different shapes in their shells, which are not always made in the same style as application icons from Google Play. Android Oreo solves this problem by allowing developers to create what are called responsive icons. One application can have several icons of different shapes. The system analyzes the desktop and displays the desired one.
New operating system Android 8 Oreo
Most of the changes you'll find are definitely on the evolutionary side of the spectrum rather than the revolutionary, which is great, although we can easily understand why some end up finding Android Oreo a boring update.
There aren't many new features here that will significantly change the way you interact with your device, as this year's software overhaul is focused on improvements from within the system.
Here are our impressions.
Performance and autonomy
Google continues to refine the Doze mode, which was designed to save battery power. A smartphone running the new version of Android will limit the activities of applications in the background. For example, location updates will be disabled. You, as a user, will not have to configure anything; Doze mode will be active by default.
Google engineers also worked on performance. According to the company, Nexus and Pixel devices running Android Oreo turn on twice as fast as those running Android Nougat.
New in a new way!
Besides just changing the layout, Google linked similar items in the same menu, saving a lot of clutter. Look at things, when you open the Settings menu on your Android Nougat device, you will find at least 24-25 menu options, while the new Android Oreo OS only has a dozen of them.
As you can imagine, this makes the menu settings more organized, but it can make it more difficult to quickly find the menu item you need. We thank the developers for the convenient search function!
Emoji
Google has made a major change to the design of emoji - they are now much more similar to emoji in iOS. If you are a “pure” Android user and have been using standard emoji for a long time, this will probably be unusual. According to Google, the redesign was carried out to ensure that users of different platforms do not encounter difficulties.
Project Treble
The main problem with Android was and remains the lack of updates to the latest versions of the system. Google offers Project Treble as a solution. The essence of the project is that every user can receive an update - regardless of manufacturer, processor and other characteristics. Typically, manufacturers have to update their own skin before releasing an update, but with Treble, companies don't have to make any effort.
At one time, Google put a lot of effort into ensuring that developers could release an application that would work on billions of Android devices without any additional effort. Treble will work in a similar way.
Rescue Party
The main purpose of the Rescue Party feature is to prevent the eternal reboot that smartphones can experience when updating the system, installing custom firmware, or simply manually rebooting. This will be especially useful for Nexus 6P owners.
Android 8.0 Oreo can recognize when the device has gone into an eternal reboot. If the smartphone tries to boot, but encounters an endless iteration and the same error, the system will detect this and try to restore it. If recovery is impossible, the smartphone will be rebooted into recovery, from where you can reset it to factory settings.
Rescue Party is located in /services/core/java/com/android/server/RescueParty/java. The code is executed if system_server is restarted more than 5 times within 5 minutes, or if the service crashes 5 times within 30 seconds.
This concludes our review of Android Oreo. If we missed something or you have interesting additions and observations, write in the comments.
Ratings: 2 , average: 5.00
Safe Browsing Program Actions
Using WebView technology with the Safe Browsing API, Android 8.1 apps can detect when a WebView instance tries to find a URL that Google has classified as a known threat. By default, the user is shown an intermediate warning about a known threat, with the option to load the URL anyway or return to the previous safe page.
Also in Android 8.1, developers can allow apps to programmatically determine how they will respond to known threats:
- Report known threats to Safe Browsing.
- Automatically perform a specific action: for example, return to a safe page every time the application encounters a URL with a threat classification.
