Android 8.0 Oreo complete list of new changes & features, Hands-on demo videos

Google made Android 8.0 Oreo official and the update roll-out was promised as coming to Nokia smartphones by the year-end as per the Google’s official blog post. Even HMD has repeatedly confirmed that all Nokia Android smartphones including Nokia 3 will get Android Oreo.

So far Nokia 8 and Nokia 6 2018 received the Android Oreo update Stable version, while Nokia 5 and 6 users received the Android Oreo Beta. Read our full coverage here.

Android Oreo 8.0 brings many new features such as picture-in-picture, autofill, integrated Instant Apps, Google Play Protect, faster boot time, and much more. You can read the full detailed changelog for Nokia Android Smartphones below. Also, watch our side by side comparison video of Android Oreo vs Android Nougat along with other Android Oreo hands-on demo videos.

Side by Side Video Demo of new features & changes:

You can check the hands-on demo below to see the side by side comparison of Android Oreo and Nougat.

Android Oreo vs Android Nougat: All New Features & Changes

Here we have listed all the changes and new features (Official + unmentioned) below.

Cool New features:

• The Night light feature makes the display amber for making it suitable for using it in Night or low-lighting conditions. This feature is not even available on Nexus smartphones and thus it feels great to see it on Nokia 8. You can either manually switch on/off this feature or schedule it to auto-activate/deactivate during a fixed time period. You can even control the intensity of Night light. You can learn how to use Night light feature in our hands-on video below.
• Now you can swipe up from anywhere on the home screen to open the App drawer or App list as you like to call it.

UI & Multitasking changes:

• Picture-in-picture (PIP) lets users manage two tasks simultaneously on any size screen, and it’s easy for apps to support it. Apps supporting PIP mode will keep on playing in a small window even if one switches over to another app or goes to home screen. Here is the list of apps supporting PIP mode and how to enable this mode and use it.
• Notification center and Quick-action buttons have undergone complete revamp. Please check the demo video above to see how Notification center and quick-action button have changed from Nougat to Oreo
• Settings Page has undergone a complete redesign with sub-menus nicely tucked under major menus. Even Sub-menus have advanced setting placed under an expandable heading.
• Android Oreo brings the capability to change the shape of apps icons from default circle to Squircle, Square, Cylindrical and others.

•  Ambient Display feature on Nokia and other Android smartphones wakes up your lock-screen for few seconds when a notification arrives. This feature is not available on Nokia 8 though as it comes with Glance screen feature.

Notification Changes:

• Notification dots extend the reach of notifications and offer a new way to surface activity in your apps. Dots work with zero effort for most apps — we even extract the color of the dot from your icon.
• Notifications category allows one to choose which notification to show or hide in any particular app
• Notifications can be snoozed from appearing in Notification center
• Notifications pick up the Album art as background in both notification center and on Lock Screen when you play music

Usability improvements:

• Autofill framework simplifies how users set up a new device and synchronize their passwords. Apps using form data can optimize their apps for Autofill, and password manager apps can use the new APIs to make their services available to users in their favorite apps. Autofill will roll out fully over the next few weeks as part of an update to Google Play Services.
• Smart Text Selection: Google is applying on-device machine learning to copy/paste, to let Android recognize entities like addresses, URLs, telephone numbers, and email addresses. This makes the copy/paste experience better by selecting the entire entity and surfacing the right apps to carry out an action based on the type of entity.

Other Changes:

• Enjoy the all new Emoji collection as a part of Android Oreo

Backup & Reset changes:

Backup and Reset options exist separately in Oreo and offer much granular control over what data to backup, auto-restore and also shows detailed description of what has been backed up. There are new options to reset only “Network settings and the overall App data”. There are more change however that you would like to see in the video below.

Under the hood:

• System optimizations: We worked across the system to help apps run faster and smoother — for example, in the runtime we added a new concurrent compacting garbage collection, code locality, and more.
• Background limits: We added new limits on background location and wi-fi scans and changes in the way apps run in the background. These boundaries prevent unintentional overuse of battery and memory and apply to all apps — make sure you understand and account for these in your apps.
• Complementary Android Vitals dashboards and IDE profilers: In the Play Console you can now see aggregate data about your app to help you pinpoint common issues – excessive crash rate, ANR rate, frozen frames, slow rendering, excessive wakeups, and more. You’ll also find new performance profilers in Android Studio 3.0, and new instrumentation in the platform.

For developers:

• Autosizing textview: Use autosizing TextView to automatically fill a TextView with text, regardless of the amount. You can create an array of preset text sizes, or set min and max sizes with a step granularity, and the text will grow and shrink to fill the available TextView space.
• Fonts in XML: Fonts are now a fully supported resource type. You can now use fonts in XML layouts and define font families in XML.
• Downloadable fonts and emoji: With downloadable fonts you can load fonts from a shared provider instead of including them in your APK. The provider and support library manage the download of fonts and shares them across apps. The same implementation also supports downloadable emoji, so you can get updated emoji without being limited to the emoji built into the device.
• Adaptive icons: You can now create adaptive icons that the system displays in different shapes, based on a mask selected by a device manufacturer. The system also animates interactions with the icons, and uses them in the launcher, shortcuts, settings, sharing dialogs, and in the overview screen. Adaptive icons display in a variety of shapes across different device models.
• Shortcut pinning: App shortcuts and homescreen widgets are great for engaging users and now you can let users add and pin shortcuts and widgets to the launcher from within your app. There’s also a new option to add a specialized activity to help users create shortcuts. The activity is complete with custom options and confirmation.
• Wide-gamut color for apps: Imaging apps can now take full advantage of new devices that have a wide-gamut color capable display. To display wide gamut images, apps enable a flag in their manifest files (per activity) and load bitmaps with an embedded wide color profile (AdobeRGB, Pro Photo RGB, DCI-P3, etc.).
• WebView enhancements: In Android Oreo, we’ve enabled WebView multiprocess mode by default and added an API to let your app handle errors and crashes. You can also opt in your app’s WebView objects to verify URLs through Google Safe Browsing.
• Java 8 Language APIs and runtime optimizations: Android now supports several new Java Language APIs, including the new java.time API. In addition, the Android Runtime is faster than ever before, with improvements of up to 2x on some application benchmarks.

Hands-on Videos:

You can also check our hands-on demo video of Android Oreo on Nokia 5 and 6 below. We have demoed all major Android Oreo features/changes including PIP mode in the video.