Samsung is concluding its Android 8.0 Oreo beta for the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus on January 15th, the South Korean company revealed in a notice sent to its testers earlier this week. The final phase of signups will finish today, with the program itself being set to end approximately ten weeks after its launch. In total, the initiative encompassed nine countries and over ten thousand owners of Samsung’s Android flagship duo, having provided them with up to five experimental builds of the new mobile operating system, depending on where they were located, as some countries were only added to the program last month after three software versions have already been tested.
Following the release of yet another Android 8.0 Oreo beta build in late December, the Seoul-based company is expected to deliver at least one more software package before concluding its test. The development suggests Samsung may already start pushing out stable versions of Android 8.0 Oreo to the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus in the second half of January, a few weeks earlier than initially projected. Save for an issue that affected the signal strength of certain Snapdragon 835-powered units in the United States, the beta program provided owners of the firm’s pair of flagships with a relatively smooth experience and didn’t make them deal with any major bugs. The ten-week testing period largely corresponds to Samsung’s efforts to optimize Android 7.0 Nougat for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge in late 2016 and early 2017. The jump to Android 8.0 Oreo won’t bring support for Google’s Project Treble to the Galaxy S8 series so the speed of future updates designed for the two handsets is likely to remain unchanged.
The first Samsung-made devices running Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box are expected to be officially announced in late February and come in the form of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus. The successors to Samsung’s 2017 smartphones should offer a software experience that’s largely identical to the one available on Galaxy S8 units running Oreo-based Samsung Experience 9.0 but the addition of Project Treble support has the potential to improve the frequency of their updates, should Samsung choose to take full advantage of Google’s software solution.