I’ve been running Android O for a little over a week now and there’s definitely some goodies coming out of it. Yes, it’s a developer preview and yes it’s not meant for the majority of the consumers, but we can still take some elements from it.
There’s definitely some design elements in the UI and UX that need to be checked, overlapping icons in the notification tray or glitches when rendering screens or the transition that was similar to white noise. This did not prevent the use of the device in any way. I can deal with some stuff that’s out of place, where it becomes challenging is with key system components.
I used the gCloud restore feature instead of setting up a new device, so Google went ahead and restored 99 apps that I had and reloaded the user data for some of them, which was awesome! I did not encounter any application crashes, fault, force close on anything EXCEPT the notification pull down once. Could be I tried to open it too fast the first time after it booted.
The WiFi portion seems to have been an afterthought, while it took anywhere between 3 to 5 minutes to start getting WiFi connections to show up and took just as long for connecting to any known WiFi points. On the end of this, if the DATA portion was OFF the WiFi would never connect. The fun part is that I didn’t get any random reboots or crashes, what I did get after a week of usage was a reboot and at the point, I was so pumped to go look at the error log to notice there wasn’t one. (Could I have been pressing the power button and it rebooted in my pocket?) Mystery!
The biggest problem currently on the developer built is the extreme battery drain. Normally I’d charge my phone to 100% before going to work and overall I’d still have 55% after 8hours. “Laugh out loud”, because on the Android O developer preview I got to less than 10% in less than 8 hours. After a week of that, I had enough and flashed myself back to Android 7.1.1 and updated myself back to the beta of 7.1.2.
The journey continues! Now I’m going to wait to see the next release of Android O and see how well that one fares.
