ZTE and HTC bringing some Android 8.0 Oreo love to the US

Despite Android 8.0 Oreo being released five months ago (August 2017), the latest version of Google’s mobile OS is still running on less than one percent of handsets. Adoption from manufacturers has been slow and news of beta software is sparse for devices which released with an older version of Android.

ZTE promised last year that they would bring Oreo to the Axon 7, which launched roughly 18 months ago in mid-2016. It looks like they are keeping their word as members of the ZTE beta program in the United States have started reporting receiving an Oreo beta build, including the January 2018 security patch which protects against the Spectre vulnerability. No confirmation on how long the beta stage is expected to run for and when the stable release will happen.

HTC released Oreo for unlocked versions of the U11 and U11 Life in some markets back in November 2017, but as often happens with Android phones the update wasn’t available to devices from individual network operators. Mo Versi, the Vice President of Product Management at HTC announced via Twitter that Sprint had approved the rollout of Oreo for the HTC U11 on their network in the US. Update notifications will start appearing from Monday, likely in waves. If yours isn’t in the first wave then manually checking for updates should work too.