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
picture-in-picture 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.
Tooltips can also be set for views. 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. 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 based on
Wi-Fi Aware,
Bluetooth 5, 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. 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,
aptX,
aptX HD and
LDAC Bluetooth codecs. Android Oreo supports new
emoji that were included in the
Unicode 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. 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 Android architecture 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
hardware abstraction layer known as the "vendor interface". Vendor interfaces must be
forward-compatible 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 prompt a factory reset. The Android 8.1 update also introduces a
neural network API designed to "[provide] apps with hardware acceleration for on-device
machine learning operations." This API is designed for use with machine learning platforms such as
TensorFlow Lite, and specialized co-processors such as the
Pixel Visual Core (featured in Google's
Pixel 2 smartphones, but dormant until 8.1 is installed), but it also provides a
CPU 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 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. 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. == See also ==