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

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system used for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on the ...

. It was initially unveiled as an

alpha quality The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

developer preview in March 2017 and later made available to the public, on August 21, 2017. It contains a number of major features, including notification channels,

picture-in-picture Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a feature that can be found in television receivers, personal computers, and smartphones. It consists of a video stream playing within an inset window, freeing the rest of the screen for other tasks. For televisions, ...

support for video, performance improvements, and battery usage optimization, and support for

autofill Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application software, application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android (operating system), Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical us ...

ers,

Bluetooth 5 Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

, system-level integration with

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

apps, wide

color gamut In color reproduction and colorimetry, a gamut, or color gamut , is a convex set containing the colors that can be accurately represented, i.e. reproduced by an output device (e.g. printer or display) or measured by an input device (e.g. ...

s, 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 Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acc ...

. As of January 2025, Android Oreo (which has ceased receiving security updates as of October 2021) ran on a combined 3.09% of Android devices (2.01% on Android 8.0 and 1.08% on Android 8.1).

History

Android Oreo was internally codenamed "Oatmeal Cookie." On March 21, 2017, Google released the first developer preview of Android "O", available for the

Nexus 5X The Nexus 5X (codenamed bullhead) is an Android smartphone manufactured by LG Electronics, co-developed with and marketed by Google as part of its Nexus line of flagship devices. Unveiled on September 29, 2015, it was a successor to the Nexus ...

Nexus 6P Nexus 6P (codenamed ''Angler'') is an Android smartphone developed and marketed by Google and manufactured by Huawei. It succeeded the Nexus 6 as the flagship device of the Nexus line of Android devices by Google and was the final Nexus befor ...

Nexus Player The Nexus Player is a digital media player that was co-developed by Google, Intel and Asus. It was the second media player in the Google Nexus family of consumer devices. Originally running the Android 5.0 ("Lollipop") operating system, it wa ...

Pixel C The Pixel C is a 10.2-inch (260 mm) Android tablet developed and marketed by Google. The device was unveiled during a media event on September 29, 2015. On October 9, 2018, it was succeeded by the Pixel Slate. Specifications Hardware ...

, and both Pixel smartphones. The second, considered beta quality, was released on May 17, 2017. The third developer preview was released on June 8, 2017, and offered a finalized version of the API. DP3 finalized the release's API to API level 26, changed the camera UI, reverted the Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity levels in the status bar back to Wi-Fi being on the left, added themed notifications, added a battery animation in Settings: Battery, a new icon and darker background for the Clock app, and a teardrop icon shape for apps. On July 24, 2017, a fourth developer preview was released which included the final system behaviors and the latest bug fixes and optimizations. Android "O" was officially released on August 21, 2017, under the name "Oreo", after the

Oreo Oreo (; stylized in all caps) is an American brand of sandwich cookie consisting of two cocoa biscuits with a sweet fondant filling. Oreos were introduced in 1912 by Nabisco, and the brand has been owned by Mondelez International since its me ...

brand of sandwich cookie. Its lawn statue was unveiled at a promotional event across from Chelsea Market in New York City—a building which formerly housed a

Nabisco Nabisco (, abbreviated from the earlier name National Biscuit Company) is an American manufacturer of cookies and snacks headquartered in East Hanover, New Jersey. The company is a subsidiary of Illinois-based Mondelēz International. Nabisco' ...

factory where Oreo cookies were first produced. Factory images were made available for compatible Pixel and Nexus devices later that day. The Sony Xperia XZ1 and Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact were the first devices available with Oreo pre-installed. Android 8.1 was released in December 2017 for Pixel and Nexus devices, which features minor bug fixes and user interface changes.

Features

User experience

Notifications can be snoozed, and batched into topic-based groups known as "channels". The 'Major Ongoing' feature orders the alerts by priority, pinning the most important application to the top slot. Android Oreo contains integrated support for

modes. The "Settings" app features a new design which has been reduced in size, with a white theme and deeper categorization of different settings, while its ringtone, alarm and notification sound settings now contain an option for adding custom sounds to the list.

Tooltip The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common graphical user interface (GUI) element in which, when hoverbox, hovering over a screen element or component, a text box displays information about that element, such as a description of a ...

s can also be set for views. The Android 8.1 update supports the display of battery percentages for connected

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

devices, makes the notification shade slightly translucent, and dims the on-screen navigation keys to reduce the possibility of

burn-in Burn-in is the process by which components of a system are exercised before being placed in service (and often, before the system being completely assembled from those components). This testing process will force certain failures to occur under ...

. Notification alert sounds are also limited to one per second for each app.

Platform

Android Oreo adds support for Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN) for

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

based on Wi-Fi Aware,

, wide

s in apps, an

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

for

ers, multiprocess and Google Browsing support for WebViews, an API to allow system-level integration for

apps, and launching activities on remote displays.

Android Runtime Android Runtime (ART) is an application runtime environment used by the Android operating system. Replacing Dalvik, the process virtual machine originally used by Android, ART performs the translation of some of the application's bytecode i ...

(ART) features performance improvements. Android Oreo contains additional limits on apps' background activities to improve battery life. Apps can specify "adaptive icons" for differently-shaped containers specified by themes, such as circles, squares, and squircles. Android Oreo adds native support for

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was developed by Dolby, AT&T, Fraunhofer and Sony, originally as part of the MPEG-2 specification but later improved under MPEG-4.ISO (2006ISO/ ...

aptX aptX (''apt'' stands for ''audio processing technology'') is a family of proprietary audio codec compression algorithms owned by Qualcomm, with a heavy emphasis on wireless audio applications. History The original compression algorithm was ...

, aptX HD and LDAC

codecs. Android Oreo supports new

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

that were included in the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

10 standard. A new emoji font was also introduced, which notably redesigns its face figures to use a traditional circular shape, as opposed to the "blob" design that was introduced on

KitKat Kit Kat (stylised as KitKat in various countries) is a chocolate-covered wafer bar confection created by Rowntree's of York, England. It is produced globally by Nestlé (which acquired Rowntree's in 1988), except in the United States, where i ...

. Support for downloadable fonts was introduced in Android Oreo; this functionality is also available for older versions of Android via the AndroidX Core library. The underlying architecture of Android was revised so that low-level, vendor-specific code for supporting a device's hardware can be separated from the Android OS framework using a

known as the "vendor interface". Vendor interfaces must be made

forward compatible Forward compatibility or upward compatibility is a design characteristic that allows a system to accept input intended for a later version of itself. The concept can be applied to entire systems, electrical interfaces, telecommunication signal ...

with future versions of Android. This new architecture, called Project Treble, allows the quicker development and deployment of Android updates for devices, as vendors would only need to make the necessary modifications to their bundled software. All devices shipping with Oreo must support a vendor interface, but this feature is optional for devices being updated to Oreo from an earlier version. The "seamless updates" system introduced in Android 7.0 was also modified to download update files directly to the system partition, rather than requiring them to be downloaded to the user partition first. This reduces storage space requirements for system updates. Android Oreo introduces a new automatic repair system known as "Rescue Party"; if the operating system detects that core system components are persistently crashing during startup, it will automatically perform a series of escalating repair steps. If all automatic repair steps are exhausted, the device will reboot into recovery mode and offer to perform a factory reset. The Android 8.1 update also introduces a

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

API, which is designed to " rovideapps with hardware acceleration for on-device

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

operations." This API is designed for use with machine learning platforms such as

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a Library (computing), software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks, but is used mainly for Types of artificial neural networks#Training, training and Statistical infer ...

Lite, and specialized co-processors such as the Pixel Visual Core (featured in Google's

Pixel 2 The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are a pair of Android (operating system), Android smartphones designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. They collectively serve as the successors to the Pixel (1st generation) ...

smartphones, but dormant until 8.1 is installed), but it also provides a

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

fallback mode.

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 has platform optimizations designed to reduce mobile data usage (including enabling Data Saver mode by default), and a special suite of

Google Mobile Services Google Mobile Services (GMS) is a collection of proprietary applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) services from Google that are typically pre-installed on the majority of Android devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and ...

designed to be less resource- and bandwidth-intensive. The

Google Play Store Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store, Play Store, or sometimes the Android Store (and was formerly Android Market), is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certifie ...

would also highlight lightweight apps suited for these devices. 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 Google Play Services is a proprietary software package produced by Google for installation on Android devices. It consists of background services and libraries for use by mobile apps running on the device. When it was introduced in 2012, it pr ...

was also modularized to reduce its

memory footprint Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. The word footprint generally refers to the extent of physical dimensions that an object occupies, giving a sense of its size. In computing, t ...

. Android Go was made available to OEMs for Android 8.1.

Security

Android Oreo re-brands 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

, 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 Amazon Appstore is an app store for Android-compatible platforms operated by Amazon.com Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon. On August 20, 2025 the Amazon Appstore will be inaccessible on third party Android devices and apps bought from the Am ...

and

F-Droid F-Droid is a free and open source app store and software repository for Android (operating system), Android, serving a similar function to the Google Play store. The main repository, hosted by the project, contains only free software, free and o ...

). A verified boot now includes a "Rollback Protection" feature, which enforces a restriction on 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.

References

External links

* {{Google LLC 2017 software Android (operating system) versions Oreo