Android Oreo 8.1 Coming To Pixel Phones In The “Coming Weeks”

As you all know, we just posted that Google announced the Pixel Visual Core this morning, the company’s first in-house SoC for smartphones. They didn't stop there, they also announced that an Android 8.1 update is arriving in the “coming weeks.” Through their blog post with details on the Pixel Visual Core they mentioned that we’ll see this chipset first enabled with Android Oreo 8.1.




Here's what they said :

In the coming weeks, we will enable Pixel Visual Core as a developer option in the developer preview of Android Oreo 8.1 (MR1).

That's the only detail we have. Looks like Android 8.1 will be the first maintenance release (MR1) for Oreo and will show up on the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL.

If MR1 for Oreo is anything like MR1 for Nougat, we could see a handful of new features. Remember last year with Android 7.1, Google gave us App Shortcuts, support for circular icons, image keyboard support (like GIFs and stickers in Gboard), and a couple of other minor changes.

As we learn more about Android 8.1, we’ll let you know.