Google Phone 9.0 Prepares For Android 8.0 O; Update Have Android O Features & Pet Paws

A teardown of Google Phone 9.0 update has revealed some suggestions of upcoming Android O features, including the Notification Channels found in the developer preview. However far from official release, these hidden features are good signs that Google is already preparing for the eventual release of the Android O.

In a teardown of the Google Phone 9.0 Android Package Kit (APK), signs of Android O support have been determined among the app's resources by Android Police. Among the countless things, Google's new mobile OS will bring when it launches later this year is a change to the way alerts are handled.

Android O will have a feature called Notification Channels, which will let users decide which kind of notifications they will receive from a specific app, so that phone won't be bombarded by alerts user don't want. In the Phone app, Google will be dividing notifications into categories, including incoming and outgoing calls, missed calls, and voicemails, as reported by Greenbot.

Apart from Notification Channels, there are several other secret features embedded in the Google Phone 9.0 APK. These are post-call messaging, in-call picture messaging, dialer codes for Motorola, and strange images of dog and cat paws.

Google also seems to add new messaging capabilities into the Google Phone 9.0 app. Additionally, Google seems to be adding MMS capabilities into the phone app so the user won't need to jump to another app to send a picture to the person on the other end of a conversation.

The user can side-load the Google-signed APK from APK Mirror, but keep in mind that the features discovered are not yet official. Until Google makes major announcements, these features are all possibilities that may or may not be implemented in the future. The Google Phone app is only available for Pixel, Nexus, and other devices using Android One.