If you were hoping that Google would officially announce the next major build of Android at Google I/O in May, you will actually be pleased to learn that Google has actually announced it much earlier. In an announcement on the Android Developer Blog, Google has made the next major Android build official in the form of Android O.
Now what the “O” stands for is still anyone’s guess, and as for the version number, we can only assume it will be Android 8.0, at least for now but we’ll keep our eyes peeled anyway. Naturally with every major Android build, Google introduces a bunch of new features and improvements that they’ll be making to its mobile OS, and Android O is no different.
According to Google, some of the new features and improvements users can expect would be to battery life, where there will be automatic limits on what apps can do in the background. There are also new notification channels where users can choose what notifications they want to see. There are new autofill APIs, picture-in-picture for handsets and new windowing features, adaptive icons, support for high quality Bluetooth audio codecs, and more.
The best part is that the developer preview of Android O is already available for developers to download and check out. Regular users can probably do the same but given that we don’t expect Android O to be released anytime soon, what you see here is probably a very early build and probably shouldn’t be used as your daily driver, but if you’re interested then head on over to Google’s website for the details.