Not everybody can get a high end phone which runs on Android Oreo that easily. Looks like Google had it all thought out!
At Google in May of this year, Google promised a version of Android custom-designed for low-end devices. Today, “Android Go (Oreo edition)” is being made available for device manufacturers and developers. That doesn’t mean it’s available to users yet — but presumably that’ll happen in fairly short order.
The premise behind Android Go is pretty simple. It’s a build of Android Oreo that is designed to run better on phones with either 512MB or 1GB of RAM. By comparison, the Pixel 2 (like most flagships) has 4GB of RAM, while and the Galaxy Note 8 has a whopping 6GB.
Making the same operating system work on both flagships and the cheapest of cheap phones is a challenge, but it’s one Google says it’s overcome. Go edition is not meant to be a “fork” of Android Oreo so much as a variant that a manufacturer can just set by ticking off a configuration flag.
Setting those configurations does a few things. It sets the phone up to use the “Go” versions of a handful of Google apps — including the main Google app, Google Assistant, Google Maps, Gmail, and so on.
Some of those apps, like YouTube Go which you must’ve read about in the previous article, have special features for downloading stuff over Wi-Fi. In other cases, the “Go” versions are radically smaller than their regular variants. The smaller apps and slimmer OS can as much as halve the amount of storage that’s taken up by default on a brand new phone.
There are also “performance and storage improvements” in the Go edition of Oreo — and you’d think that you’d want that for every Android phone. But in this case, that’s not necessarily true; optimizing an app to take up less storage can also mean it takes a little longer to launch. On phones where storage is at a premium, you optimize for that. On most high-end phones, however, you’d rather get those milliseconds back.
So readers, what do you think about the Android Oreo Go? Is it really gonna be as good an idea as they say it would be? Let us know in the comments below.
Posted by
Saraansh Soni
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