Shortly after Google officially announced its first Developer Preview for Android 8.1, the company has now started rolling out the update over the air. If you have enrolled in the Android Beta Program, expect the update notification any moment now.
The update is currently available for Nexus and Pixel devices and if everything goes right, the public version should launch next month. As for the changes, check the official changelog below.
- Neural networks API: The Neural Networks API (NNAPI) provides apps with hardware acceleration for on-device machine learning operations. The API supports on- device model creation, compilation, and execution.
- Notifications: Apps can now only make a notification alert sound once per second. Alert sounds that exceed this rate aren’t queued and are lost. This change doesn’t affect other aspects of notification behavior and notification messages still post as expected.
- Improved targeting for low-RAM devices
- Autofill framework updates: custom descriptions that the Android System shows in the autofill save UI, specify a Validator object that your app can use to decide if the Android System should show the autofill save UI, and more.
- EditText updates
- Programmatic Safe Browsing actions: Devs can control whether an app reports known threats to Safe Browsing, and have the app automatically perform a particular action—such as going back to safety—each time it encounters a URL that Safe Browsing classifies as a known threat.
- Video thumbnail extractor: The MediaMetadataRetriever class has a new method, getScaledFrameAtTime(), that finds a frame near a given time position and returns a bitmap with the same aspect ratio as the source frame, but scaled to fit into a rectangle of given width and height.
- Shared memory API: Android 8.1 (API level 27) introduces a new SharedMemory class. This class allows you to create, map, and manage anonymous shared memory that can be used by multiple processes or apps.
- WallpaperColors API: Adds support for managing wallpaper colors. This feature lets you create a WallpaperColors object from a bitmap, a drawable, or by using the first three most visually representative colors. You can also retrieve details of the first three noticeable colors of a wallpaper.
- Fingerprint updates
