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There has been a lot of press today covering Android P and the first developer preview dropping.  That is certainly news worthy because, honestly, it came a week or two earlier than expected.  But what is not news is the fact that the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P and Pixel C tablet will not be getting Android P, officially at least.  Google has made it very clear and very public when support for these devices would end, both in major releases and security updates.

While we can debate all day long if two years of software support is too short, it is the number that Google settled on and has published for support of devices.  The only exception, and likely the way going forward, is the Pixel 2 lineup which gets three years of major updates.  For the Nexus 5X and 6P, major build support ended in September 2017.  That means Android Oreo was the last major build.

As they did with the release of Android Oreo, we now have a rough timeline of the scheduled releases of Android P.  First, the not-so-shocking news.  It is going to be Q3 of this year before the public release of Android P happens. That falls right in line with previous Android releases and fits with the expected release of the next generation of Pixel phones.

With the release of the first developer preview today, it looks like the next one isn’t going to drop until early in May.  That, again, isn’t shocking.  Google’s developer conference, Google I/O, happens the first week in May.  When DP2 gets here, it is expected to be available to the Android Beta program for registered and supported devices.

Huawei’s sub-brand, Honor, has announced on Twitter that a beta program has opened up for Honor 7X owners to test the company’s Android Oreo build.  The new build is EMUI 8, Huawei’s variant of Oreo.

Interested in beta testing EMUI 8.0 based on @Android Oreo for the #Honor7x ? US residents sign up belowhttps://t.co/1IFAY2WFBG pic.twitter.com/ir1eYTBg84

— Honor USA (@Honor_USA) March 2, 2018

In order to apply to the beta program, you have to fill out this Google Form with your information.

The Chromium team has released a fourth developmental build of Chrome 66 to the Chrome OS Dev Channel.  This marks the fourth consecutive week that a new build has been released to the platforms Dev channel, which essentially serves as its alpha build channel.  The new update is build 66.0.3359.10 (Platform version: 10452.1.0) and is rolling out to devices in that channel today.

As always, those who have devices in the Dev Channel can type chrome://help in the omnibar of the browser to force their devices to download the update.  As a gentle reminder, the Dev Channel is not recommended to be run on production Chromebooks as it is unstable and you will likely run into bugs or issues.