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The second Android Oreo beta build that landed on the Samsung Galaxy S8 series in the United States at the beginning of this week has now been pulled by the OEM on account of a newly discovered bug. The major issue that prompted the Korean tech giant to halt the distribution of the pre-release software lies in its inability to receive a network signal under certain conditions, which in turn seems to be caused by the Phone application constantly crashing after applying the new Android Oreo beta build.
The problem seems to affect unlocked models as well as Sprint and T-Mobile’s variants. However, the official beta notice mentions that the distribution of Android Oreo beta has been halted “for some network carriers” without specifying which ones. Samsung also promises that a fix will be devised as soon as possible but the OEM was unable to give a new timeframe for when the beta distribution might resume. As for temporary fixes, some users have reported that they were able to get the phone application up and running by clearing the application’s data, but it seems that the problems reappeared following a restart. It should be reminded that these types of issues can – and to a certain extent they are expected to – occur in beta stages of development, as the main purpose of an open beta program is to get the help of the community in finding issues that otherwise may have been missed during internal testing. However, these types of major bugs that prompt an OEM to halt a beta release can sometimes slow down and push back the launch of the first public build, but there is no exact launch date set in place for Android Oreo on the Samsung Galaxy S8 to begin with, with the software only being expected to hit the stable channel in early 2018.
The first Android Oreo beta rollout for the Samsung Galaxy S8 series in the United States began in early November and went on without any major setbacks. The first beta release introduced the new Samsung Experience 9.0 whereas the second one would have included reworked UI elements for the lock screen and the Always On display, as well as various general fixes and improvements.
