Android Oreo
What is Android 8.0 Oreo?
Android 8.0 Oreo is the eighth major update to the Android operating system that contains new features and enhancements for application developers. It was released publicly on Aug. 21, 2017, and is used on Android devices across a wide variety of form factors in both enterprise and consumer use cases. It was succeeded by Android 9.0 Pie, which was first publicly released on Aug. 6, 2018.
Among Android Oreo's newest features is a picture-in-picture mode. This enables users to watch a video that is minimized to a smaller section of the screen, while still using other applications. Battery life is also enhanced by minimizing background activity in lesser used apps.
Notifications also received a redesign. Developers can create user-customizable channels for the types of notifications that can be displayed. Users can also snooze notifications. Applications on the home page display a notification dot, which is another indicator there is a notification to be viewed. In addition, apps have better guidance on data storage, with a prescribed disk space quota for cache data.
Keyboard navigation clusters are available for developers who wish to optimize their app for Chrome OS devices. Android apps can be distributed to Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices through the Google Play Store.
The Oreo release -- API level 26 -- also contains several tools that developers can incorporate into their apps. One tool is an autofill framework that enables the user to autofill information they have saved when submitting information in a form inside of an app. The platform also enables in-app pining of shortcuts and widgets, support for multiple displays, smart text selection and adaptive launcher icons.
With later updates, Google released the Neural Networks API, which supports on-device machine learning (ML) frameworks, such as TensorFlow Lite. Additional enhancements were made to the autofill framework and notifications. For example, notifications are only allowed to make a notification alert sound once per second. For further details, see the Android 8.1 Android developer documentation.
Android Oreo no longer receives security updates from Google and is officially no longer supported.
