Android P will be hitting the stable channel on August 20, known industry insider Evan Blass said Thursday. The date is in line with the Android P roadmap Google shared earlier this year, stating that the next major iteration of its operating system will be out in the third quarter of 2018. The final release of the OS should also see the company reveal its official moniker and version number, with the latter most likely being 9.0, as indicated by Google’s established product practices.
The actual name of Android P hasn’t been teased by Alphabet’s subsidiary as much as the firm pointed to the identifiers of some of its previous OS builds, with recent reports only indicating that the software has been code-named “Pistachio Ice Cream,” though Google would be breaking from precedent if it attached an internal moniker to one of its final OS releases. Much like Android Oreo, Android P is largely focused on performance and security improvements, though it also ships with a number of visual changes, including a repositioned clock icon that’s now sitting in the left corner of the status bar.
The OS also features native support for a variety of display notches so as to account for the latest product design trend in the mobile industry, in addition to making Project Treble support mandatory for all devices, regardless of whether they run Android P out of the box or end up being upgraded to it. The latter change may partially address the ecosystem’s fragmentation issues that lead to slow or non-existent updates and security patches, though it will still be up to the OEMs to take advantage of the new Android framework. Google‘s upcoming Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL flagships will almost certainly launch with Android P but may not be the first devices to do so, and a number of other handsets are likely to be upgraded to the new OS version before the Pixel 2 successors are unveiled in October.
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 2, 2018