Samsung updates the Galaxy S8 to a less-old version of Android

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S8+. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

While Samsung's newest flagship, the Galaxy S9, is just hitting the market, last year's flagship, the Galaxy S8, is getting some love, too. Samsung and its US carrier partners are finally upgrading the Galaxy S8 to Android 8.0 Oreo, a version of the OS that came out six months ago.

Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are all pushing out the update now, with no word yet on updates for the AT&T or unlocked US version.

Most of Google's engineering efforts on Android 8.0 came in the form of Project Treble, a massive overhaul of the underlying Android bits to modularize the OS away from the hardware, which should lead to easier updates. Due to the complexity of this change, the update is mostly meant for new devices that were built with Oreo in mind, and it's not coming to most upgrading phones. The rest of the changes are nice-to-have things like a revamped notification hierarchy and a lockdown on background processing.

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