Google on Monday officially launched the next major iteration of its mobile operating system and hence finally confirmed what many industry watchers have been speculating about for months now – Android 8.0 is officially called Android Oreo. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant has been dropping Oreo-related hints for a long while now, though the company has a history of serving users with red herrings and has just recently done so by shipping one of the earlier developer previews of Android Oreo with an interactive Easter egg designed to imply that Android 8.0 will be called Android Octopus. Alphabet’s subsidiary already set a precedent for this kind of a cross-brand marketing endeavor in 2013 when it launched Android 4.4 KitKat in partnership with Nestle and has now collaborated with Nabisco — which owns the Oreo brand in the United States — and Cadbury on a similar initiative.
Google also took advantage of the first solar eclipse in 99 years that will sweep the U.S. from coast to coast, using this uncommon solar event as an opportunity to launch Android 8.0 Oreo for maximum impact and lightheartedly pointing out the visual similarities between a total eclipse and an Oreo. This particular idea also isn’t unprecedented as Oreo itself ran a similar marketing campaign in spring 2015 in the United Kingdom when its initiative was touted as innovative and successful by some industry watchers and marketing specialists.
Apart from the name of the next major build of the most popular mobile OS on the planet, Google also confirmed that the first stable version of Android 8.0 Oreo is now available for the Pixel and Pixel XL and will soon be rolling out to compatible Nexus devices. Consumers who aren’t keen on waiting and want to experience the new take on stock Android as quickly as possible are able to do so by downloading and manually flashing the first Android 8.0 Oreo system images onto their devices. Everyone else who owns one of Google’s handsets can expect to receive the upgrade in the coming days as an over-the-air (OTA) package and first third-party smartphones running Android Oreo out of the box are expected to be released this fall.