Android 8.1 official: so what’s new in this version?

Android 8.0 hasn’t even made its way to a quarter of smartphones, but Google doesn’t care. No, it’s pressing ahead with Android 8.1, bringing a couple of solid improvements to the table.

The company’s Dave Burke announced the developer preview this week, also revealing features we can expect in this iteration. The first major improvement? That’ll be for Android Go devices.

“Android 8.1 includes a set of memory optimisations for Android Go configurations (1GB or less of memory). We’ve added new hardware feature constants so you can now target the distribution of your apps and APK splits to normal or low-RAM devices running Android 8.1 and later,” Burke explains.

Everyone is jumping on the mobile machine learning bandwagon, and Google is no different, adding a Neural Networks API to the platform. The company says this API will be the “foundational layer” for other machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow Lite.

Password managers and other autofill services also get a tweaking with Android 8.1, featuring several UI enhancements.

Another noteworthy tweak is that apps are only able to make one notification sound per second.