Google launches Android 8.1 Developer Preview 2; activates the ‘early version’ of Pixel Visual Core

Internet and software giant Google has launched the second Developer Preview of Android 8.1. [caption id=“attachment_4230769” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Android 8.1 Oreo. Image: Android Developers Blog[/caption] This is the final preview version before the company starts rolling out the final version to customers in December. One interesting thing for developers in this new build is that fact that Google has enabled an ‘early version’ of the Pixel Visual Core. This means that it is likely that the company has not completely optimised the performance of the custom SoC. Though, developers can enable the core in Developer settings to test out HDR+ option on their third-party apps. The company posted details about the new update in a post on Android Developers Blog. According to the blog post, the company has added ‘targeted enhancements’ to Oreo platform including a number of enhancements for the ‘Android Go’ environment and Neural Networks API. Users on Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P who have enrolled in the Android Beta Program will get the update in coming days. Google has ‘near-final Android 8.1 system images’ for the Nexus and Pixel devices along with official APIs. The API level for Android 8.1 has been decided as 27. The Neural Networks API in this build ties in with the **TensorFlow Lite** so that developers can run models such as Inception v3, Smart Reply and MobileNets. [caption id=“attachment_4210977” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Image: Tech2[/caption] The company urges developers to update their apps to support Android Oreo 8.1 before the public rollout of the update. The company has made optimisations to Android Studio 3.0 so that developers can develop apps with increased speed.