Android O, Aka Oreo Rumored To Support Picture-In-Picture, Overhauled Notifications, Adaptive App Icons

This year's Google I/O event is only about two months away, which in all likelihood means there is another major version of Android on the horizon (Google typically announces new Android builds each year at Google I/O). Ahead of its unveiling, there are some rumors floating around about Android O, or perhaps Android Oreo, as senior vice president of Android Hiroshi Lockheimer has teased on more than one occasion.

According to rumor mill chatter, Android O is going to be a rather big update with several new and updated features. One of them is updated notifications. Google already did this with the Nougat release (Android 7.0), but apparently the new build will feature "new notifications." It is anyone's guess exactly what that will entail, but one prevailing presumption is that Android O will sync notifications across devices that users sign into with their Google account. In this scenario, notifications would intelligently display only on whichever device a person is currently using.


Picture-in-picture is another big feature rumored to come with the next version of Android. This is something Google played around with last year in a developer preview of Nougat, but it was only available for Android TV. Perhaps Google is gearing up to bring PiP to all Android devices this time around, or maybe just Android tablets.

Also look for Android O to introduce adaptive app icons, or icons that dynamically change. Google's Pixel phones have this feature through the Pixel Launcher, and so it seems Google wants all of its Android device to benefit from this. The benefit here is that users are presented more relevant info in some cases, such as with the Calendar app—rather than display a 31 all of the time, with support for dynamic icons, it can change and display the current the date.

There will be several other features added to Android O, including "tons of enterprise stuff," according to the rumor mill. We're not sure exactly what sort of "enterprise stuff" is headed to Android, but certainly we would expect Google to build upon existing data, app, and device security with additional tools.

As has always been the case, the new version of Android will arrive while its immediate predecessor is still barely a blip on the radar, in terms of market share. Less than 3 percent of all Android devices have Nougat installed as of right now. The most popular version of Android is Lollipop (Android 5.0 to 5.1), which is installed on 32.5 percent of Android devices, followed by Marshmallow (Android 6.0) at 31.3 percent. And a fifth of Android devices (20.8 percent) are still running KitKat (Android 4.4).