Category: Android Nougat

Some seven months after it was released, Android Oreo is now the required Android version for manufactures who want their new phones certified by Google.  The change means that if a manufacture wants to introduce a new phone to the market and wants that phone certified by Google to run Google Mobile Services and access the Play Store, it will have to be on Oreo 8.0 or later.  Phones running Android Nougat will no longer be certified.

While we can debate why it took the Mountain View company seven months to require this, it is good news on the whole.  Oreo is far more stable and secure than any previous version of Android and it arguably provides one of the best user experiences at the same time.

Making good on its promise at Mobile World Congress, Google has rolled out Hindi language support in Google Assistant.  The announcement came from the Google Blog in India with support initially rolling out to Android devices running Marshmallow (6.0) or higher.  Support for Lollipop (5.0) will be coming shortly.

The BBC estimates that some 425 million people speak Hindi as their first language with an addition 125 million as their second language.  That is a significant number of people who will now be able to use Google Assistant to help them with tasks for gather information.

The slow and somewhat painful adoption of Android Oreo continues but there are some highlights to point out in this month’s Android Distribution Report.  Google released the report today and it shows that the latest version of the Android platform, Oreo, was installed on 1.1% of the devices that hit the Google Play Store for the 7-day period ending February 5, 2018.  That’s up .4% from the January report but there isn’t much to applaud frankly.

Android Oreo has been out now six months and despite Google and manufactures releasing updates, the needle has hardly moved on adoption.  This is likely due to a couple of reasons.  First, manufactures are being painfully slow in getting the updates out themselves.  Two, lots of people are using devices that are over 2 years old and will not be updated.

A new update to the Android Wear app is rolling out in the Play Store today, bringing some visual improvements as well as improvements for accessibility users.  The update to the app is version 2.7.0.180439970 which will then have build 2.8.0.181612071 to send to your Wear watch.  Once you get the new app update, you’ll need to also perform an update on your watch itself.  You should have a notification that there is a new update to the Android Wear app on the watch itself.

As for what is new, there are improved typefaces and fonts in this build.  The aim of these is to improve glanceability (i.e. readability) when you glance at your watch.  Also, the base theme for your watch’s menu will appear noticeably darker.  This is likely a part of the effort to improve glanceability.

OnePlus has begun the process of rolling out an update to their OxygenOS Android variant to their 2017 flagship phone, the OnePlus 5T.  The updates build of OxygenOS is 4.7.6 and in normal OnePlus fashion, is slowing going out to a select number of users today with a broader deployment happening over the course of the next few days.

The update is still based on Android Nougat 7.1.1 so for those hoping this would bring Oreo to the flagship, you have to still wait a bit.  OxygenOS 5.0 is in beta with an early 2018 release expected.  This 4.7.6 update brings a lot of fixes to the camera, other system improvements as well as the December Android Security Update patch for the device.

As expected, Google has released the December 2017 Android Distribution Report this week.  The report reflects the version of Android on devices that visited the Google Play Store for the 7 day period ending December 11, 2017 and for those of you who keep track of this monthly report, you won’t find many surprises.

With the exception of Android Nougat and Android Oreo, the two latest version of the platform, all previous version saw a decline or no change in usage from the November report to this one.  Android Nougat grew some 2.7% in usage in that time, by far the biggest gainer.  It now has a 23.3% share of devices coming to the Play Store but it is still behind Android Lollipop and Android Marshmallow.  Marshmallow, version 6.x of Android, leads the pack overall with 29.7% of devices running that version.

As for the latest version of Android, Oreo, it continues a very slow adoption on devices.  It now is on .5% of devices, a jump of .2% over November.