Android Oreo

Android Oreo (codenamed Android O during development) is the eighth major release and the 15th version of the Android mobile operating system.

It was initially unveiled as an alpha quality developer preview in March 2017 and later made available to the public on August 21, 2017.

It contains several major features, including notification channels, picture-in-picture support for video, performance improvements, and battery usage optimization, and support for autofillers, Bluetooth 5, system-level integration with VoIP apps, wide color gamuts, and Wi-Fi Aware. Android Oreo also introduces two major platform features: Android Go – a software distribution of the operating system for low-end devices – and support for implementing a hardware abstraction layer.

As of January 2026, 2.56% of devices ran Android Oreo, with 1.08% on 8.0 and 1.48% on 8.1. Android Oreo was discontinued and no longer received security updates after October 2021.[3]

History

Android Oreo was internally codenamed "Oatmeal Cookie."[4]

Features

User experience

Notifications can be snoozed, and batched into topic-based groups known as "channels".[16][17] The 'Major Ongoing' feature orders the alerts by priority, pinning the most important application to the top slot.[18] Android Oreo contains integrated support for picture-in-picture modes.[19][20][21][22] The "Settings" app features a new design which has been reduced in size, with a white theme and deeper categorization of different settings,[23][24] while its ringtone, alarm and notification sound settings now contain an option for adding custom sounds to the list.[25][26] Tooltips can also be set for views.[27]

The Android 8.1 update supports the display of battery percentages for connected Bluetooth devices, makes the notification shade slightly translucent, and dims the on-screen navigation keys to reduce the possibility of burn-in.[15][28] Notification alert sounds are also limited to one per second for each app.[29]

Platform

Android Oreo adds support for Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN) for Wi-Fi based on Wi-Fi Aware,[30] Bluetooth 5, wide color gamuts in apps,[31] an API for autofillers, multiprocess and Google Browsing support for WebViews, an API to allow system-level integration for VoIP apps, and launching activities on remote displays.[5] Android Runtime (ART) features performance improvements.[5] Android Oreo contains additional limits on apps' background activities to improve battery life.[32] Apps can specify "adaptive icons" for differently-shaped containers specified by themes, such as circles, squares, and squircles.[33]

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 includes platform optimizations to reduce mobile data usage (including enabling Data Saver mode by default) and a special suite of Google Mobile Services designed to be less resource- and bandwidth-intensive. The Google Play Store would also highlight lightweight apps suited for these devices.[48][49] 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 (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 was also modularized to reduce its memory footprint.

Android Go was made available to OEMs for Android 8.1.[46]

Security

Android Oreo rebrands 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, 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 and F-Droid). A verified boot now includes a "Rollback Protection" feature that prevents 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.[50][51]

version of	Android
screenshot	Android Oreo 8.1 screenshot.png
screenshot size	250px
developer	Google
discontinued	yes
ga date	August 21, 2017 (on Android 8.0) December 5, 2017 (on Android 8.1)
release version	8.1.0_r93 (OSN1.210329.015)‡R1R‡
kernel type	Monolithic (Linux)
release date	October 4, 2021
latest preview version	8.1.0 (OPP6.171019.012)
latest preview date	November 27, 2017
preceded by	Android Nougat (7.x)
succeeded by	Android Pie (9)
support status	Android 8.0: Unsupported as of January 5, 2021 Android 8.1: Unsupported as of October 4, 2021 Google Play Services supported‡R2R‡

History

Features

User experience

Platform

Android Go

Security

See also

External links

References