Android 8.0 Oreo is now available!

After more than a year of development and months of trial and error between developers and early adopters, Android 8.0 Oreo is officially available worldwide. Android 8.0 brings new features such as Picture in Picture, Autofill, Instant Apps, And Google Play Protect. And faster startup times, among other new features.

We will be delivering the source code to every user of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) today. The Pixel and Nexus 5X / 6P rollout is in carrier testing and is expected to be phased in over the next few weeks, as well as the Pixel C and Nexus Player rollout. Users participating in the Android test will receive the final version of the upgrade today. The image file is now available for download, and manual swiping is supported. We’ve been working with partners for months now: by the end of this year, a number of hardware vendors, including Essential, Huawei, HTC, Kyocera, MOTOROLA, HMD Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, and SONY, are all planning to upgrade their devices to Android 8.0 Oreo.

What are the features of Android Oreo?

Android 8.0 Oreo is designed to provide a smooth experience that makes Android more powerful and easy to use:

The picture-in-Picture feature, which allows users to perform two tasks simultaneously in any window size, is also easy to fit into the App. (As shown in the picture below)

Notification Dots extend the concept of Notification to provide more possibilities for application interaction. For most apps, this happens automatically, and Android even automatically selects the color of the notification logo based on the color of the app icon.
The Autofill framework simplifies the process of setting up a new device and synchronizing passwords. Applications that require tabular data can be optimized for the auto-fill framework, and password management applications can use the auto-fill service in their favorite applications through a new API. The auto-fill feature will be updated with the Google Play service in the coming weeks.

We’re also working on Android Vitals, which helps optimize battery life, shorten startup time, and improve graphics rendering efficiency and stability by giving developers more visual application data:

System optimization: We use system low-level optimization to make the application run faster and smoother. Take an example of an application that optimizes its experience at runtime through a new concurrent compacting garbage collection mechanism, code locality, and other means.
Background Restrictions: We added restrictions on background fetching locations and Wi-Fi scanning, and changed the mode in which apps run in the background. These limits avoid passive battery and memory drain and are applicable to all applications — make sure you understand this and explain it in your application.
Android Vitals Information Center with a variety of features and IDE Profilers: In the Play console, you now see a summary of your application’s data that can help you find common problems. The data includes exceptional application crash rates, application unresponsiveness, frame stuck times, slow rendering times, over-wake up, and so on. You can also find new performance profilers in Android Studio 3.0, as well as new meter layouts.

As you can see above, in Android 8.0, you can set a shortcut to an in-app function directly and attach it to the desktop launcher

As shown above, notifications keep users active in the app and jump them directly to the core features of the app

Android Oreo also has a lot of new features for developers to make their apps more efficient and better. So what are the new features?

Automatically resize TextView text:

Android Oreo 8.0 allows developers to customize the TextView to automatically adjust the font size of the text content to fit the TextView size, and applies to all text lengths. The developer must set a range of text sizes, or set a maximum or minimum (with a fixed number of digits between them), so that the text automatically expands or shrinks depending on the size of the TextView.

Font resources in XML:

The Fonts resource type is fully supported in Android O, allowing developers to access Fonts and define font families directly in AN XML layout.

Downloadable fonts and emoticons:

Android 8.0 allows developers to get downloadable font resources from common vendors without having to bind fonts to APK. Vendors and Android support libraries are responsible for downloading fonts and sharing them with each App. The same can be done to access emoji resources, taking your development beyond the in-device emoji pack.

Adaptive ICONS:

This feature helps developers make better use of the device’s user interface by creating adaptive ICONS that change shape depending on the template chosen by the device manufacturer. Interactive animations with ICONS have also been added to the launcher, shortcuts, Settings, shared dialogs, and overview screens.

Adaptive ICONS can be displayed in different shapes on different device models

Shortcut lock:

App shortcuts and desktop widgets are great ways to attract users. Starting with Android 8.0 Oreo, users can add and lock shortcuts to the launcher within the app. At the same time, the new system also supports the addition of specific activities to help users create shortcuts that require custom options and user consent.

Support for a wider range of colors:

Android graphics apps can take advantage of the new device’s wide-area color support to display wide-range images. The application will need to enable a flag in its manifest file (per activity), load enable wide bitmap embedded color profiles (e.g. Adobe GB, Pro Photo RGB, DCI-P3, etc.).

WebView WebView:

Android 8.0 Oreo enables the WebView multi-process mode by default. New apis are added to control application processing errors and crashes, enhancing security and improving application stability. To further improve security, developers can use Google Safe Browsing to control the URL of their own WebView within their application.

Java 8 APIs and Runtime optimizations:

Android now supports several new Java language apis, including the new Java.time API. In addition, Android Runtime is faster than ever, up to twice as fast in some benchmarks.

Want to learn more about the above functions, or learn other new features information, please go to the developer. The android. Google. Cn, and refer to the following links from the android 8.0 Oreo’s official website.

(https://developer.android.google.cn/about/versions/o/index.html)

Make sure your App is ready

If you’re not ready, take some time to test your App and make sure users can continue to use your App smoothly after upgrading to Android 8.0 Oreo.

Please download your current App to any device or emulator running Android 8.0 Oreo via Google Play. The App should run smoothly, display good images, and perfectly cope with the behavioral changes after the system upgrade.

You need to pay special attention to the following points:

Background location restriction
Notification classification channel
Network transformation
Security change
The id is changed.

Once the changes are made to your App and the issues are resolved, please release them on Google Play via alpha, beta, or official release channels to ensure that users who update to Android 8.0 Oreo can continue to use your App.

Speed up the development process with Android Studio

When you are ready to develop with the new API provided by Android 8.0 Oreo, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of Android Studio 3.0 (now available in beta). More powerful App performance metrics include support for the Kotlin programming language, Gradle build optimizations, Instant App functionality, XML font resources, downloadable fonts, and adaptive ICONS.

As shown above, Android Studio 3.0 has built-in widgets that allow developers to enjoy Android 8.0 Oreo features while developing, such as previewing font resources in XML in their own apps.

We also recommend that developers upgrade to Android support library 26.0.2 (available at Google’s Maven Repository). At the same time, you can go to SDK Manager with the new SDK management tools and emulator required images.

If you are just starting to develop on Android 8.0 Oreo, please read the Android O Migration Guide for the necessary steps and configuration changes.

Submit a new version of your app to Google Play

Google Play is now open to apps built with API level 26 in mind. When ready, you can submit the upgrade through the Alpha, beta, or official release channels.

Make sure your updated app runs well on Android Oreo as well as other versions of Android. It is recommended to use the Google Play beta to get a small amount of user feedback before launching a formal push. We look forward to your app updates!

Next step for Android Oreo?

We’re closing the Developer Preview issue Tracker, but keep your feedback up! You can now use the AOSP Issue Tracker to provide feedback on issues in Android 8.0.

Thanks again to the many developers and early adopters who participated in the Android O Developer preview and public beta. You’ve provided valuable feedback and questions that will help us make Android Oreo a great platform.

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