Android 8.0 'Oreo' ready to roll

Google has taken the wraps off the final 8.0 Oreo version of its Android mobile operating system.

Oreo promises better performance than prior Android variants, with speedier boot-up and and task launches.

Battery life improvements through more aggressive limits to apps running in the background, deep colour for more lifelike rendering of images and video, and integrated support for Mobile Printing Alliance (Mopria) certified printers also feature in Android 8.0.

Google has also sharpened security and stopped hostile downloader apps from operating without permission, and enhanced its Play Protect app-scanning service to discover malicious code early on.

New notifications with ambient screens linking the alerts to their respective apps, emojis, automatically sized text, tooltip bubbles, and full-bleed adaptive icons are some of the new user interface features to arrive with Oreo.

The source code for Oreo has been released to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and binary images for Google's Pixel and Nexus 5X and 6P smartphones.

Vendors such as General Mobile, Huawei, Kyocera, LG, Samsung, Sony, HTC and HMD/Nokia Phones will release Oreo upgrades for their newer devices over the coming months.

Although Google releases new versions of Android regularly, users with even relatively new devices won't get the updates from hardware vendors.

According to Google's own statistics, the vast majority of current Android devices, 77.5 percent, run versions 4.4, 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 of the operating system. The oldest of these, 4.4 "Kitkat" came out in 2011.

Android version 7.0 and 7.1, released last year, is found on only 13.5 percent of devices.

The current production release of Apple's iOS mobile operating system is installed on 87 percent of devices, with iOS 9 found on 10 percent of iPhones, iPads and iPods, and 3 percent running an even older version.

Google is seeking to remediate this fragmentation problem with Oreo through Project Treble, which rearchitects Android to become more modular and less dependent on vendor implementations of the operating system.