Google teased last week that it’d offer an Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview soon, and today that’s exactly what we got.
The Android 8.1 Developer Preview 1 is now official. It’s available to the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, Pixel and Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6P.
You’ve got a couple of options when it comes to getting the Android 8.1 preview. You can enroll in the Android Beta Program and have the update pushed to you over the air, or if you don’t feel like waiting, you can manually flash the system image to your device. Just keep in mind that installing a system image removes all of your data from the device and that manually flashed system images do not automatically receive OTA updates.
According to Google’s timeline, this first Android 8.1 preview includes final APIs. Google plans to offer Android 8.1 Developer Preview 2 in mid-November, and that should be a near-final system image. The final release of Android 8.1 is expected in mid-December.
Google previously said that the Android 8.1 Developer Preview will allow developers to activate the Pixel Visual Core in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. Along with the Android Camera API, the Pixel Visual Core will allow third-party apps to access Google’s custom Image Processing Unit that offers improved HDR+ that can run 5 times faster and at less than 1/10th of the energy than it if it were running on the application processor.
Android 8.1 also includes a change to notifications so that apps can only make a notification alert sound once per second. There’s also improved targeting for low RAM devices, improvements to the Autofill Framework, and more. You can check out the new features and APIs in more detail right here.
