Here’s why Samsung halted the Android 8 Oreo rollout for Galaxy S8 owners

Samsung Galaxy S8 owners were undoubtedly excited at the announcement of broader availability of the Android 8.0 Oreo update. However, unexpectedly perhaps, Samsung put the brakes on the rollout.

It turns out there’s a good reason for it, though we can well understand why users might be a touch frustrated after the software has been through a lengthy public beta process designed to iron out bugs.

Samsung’s official spokesperson said:

Following a limited number of cases where Galaxy S8 and S8+ devices have rebooted unexpectedly with the Android 8.0 Oreo, we have temporarily stopped the rollout of the update. We are investigating the issue internally to ensure that the impact to the affected devices is minimized and the rollout of the update can resume as quickly as possible.

We understand that these unexpected reboots were occurring in many cases (though not all), and Samsung has confirmed this is why the rollout has been stopped for now. Why such a bug wasn’t identified and resolved during beta testing is unknown, but Samsung claims to have a fix that it will incorporate into a new version of the update.

For Galaxy S8 users, we’ve got the following advice:

• If you’ve already applied the update, and your phone isn’t rebooting, then good news.
• If your phone is affected, then stand by – it’s likely an update will arrive soon which will resolve the problem.
• If you’ve been prompted to update, downloaded the files and not yet installed them, you won’t be able to – Samsung has sent out an instruction to Galaxy S8 phones to delete the update if it hasn’t yet been applied.
• If you’ve not actioned the notification yet, you might as well not bother – it won’t work.

The company hasn’t said as yet precisely when we can expect the Oreo release for the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ will resume. We’ll update you once we receive more information.