Download: Android 8.1 Developer Preview 1 Beta Factory Images, OTA Released, Here’s What Is New

You can now download Android 8.1 developer preview 1 beta factory images, OTA update for Pixel, Pixel 2 and Nexus devices. Here are the details.

Google has already said that Android 8.1 will be available for Pixel and Nexus devices in the next few weeks, and now the company has made the first developer preview of the software available for people to download and try out. You will obviously need to have one of the supported devices in hand if you want to give the update a whirl, but it’s there right now if you want it.

There will be two developer previews ahead of the final release of Android 8.1, with the first of those in the can already. The second, which will come next month, will be the near-final release with things like APIs already in their final state as of this initial beta release. The second preview will put the finishing touches in place ahead of a public release some time in December, with AOSP and OEM versions pencilled in to arrive before the turn of the year.

There are a number of new APIs that arrive as part of Android 8.1, many of which users will never need to know about. One of the more sexy ones however is a new Neural networks API that is aimed at offering hardware accelerated on-device machine learning, something that both Google and Apple are making big strides in, and lots of noise about right now. There’s a plethora of APIs that are much less interesting sounding but no doubt just as important to developers, but right now all we need to know is that the release is available to download. We’ve heard that there may be one or two issues flashing the factory image onto the recently released Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL however, so it may be worth hanging fire if you own one of those two smartphones.

Factory images for OPP5.170921.005 can be downloaded now, perfect for anyone who would rather not wait for the OTA update to automatically land – whenever that may be. But if it’s OTA update that you prefer, and don’t want to wait for it to rollout to your device, we have download links for that as well.

Factory images of Android 8.1 are linked below:

And OTA images can be downloaded from here:

Enjoy installing or flashing and good luck!

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