Android Oreo and its Special Rescue Party Feature

Android Oreo comes with tons of under-the-hood changes and there are plenty of new goodies to be discovered once the full update is released. For example, I have just discovered the fact that with the latest Android 8.0 Oreo, Google is promising to send a “Rescue Party” when a device is stuck in a loop. If you want to find out more about Android Oreo and its special Rescue Party Feature, you are definitely in the right place.

Even if not all of us like to admit it, the truth is that people will often see their device getting stuck during the boot cycle; this is commonly referred to as a bootloop and I bet that you are no stranger to that. As Google reveals, Android 8.0 includes a feature that basically sends out a “rescue party” when it notices core system components stuck in crash loops.

To be more precise, Rescue Party will automatically kick in when it detects that “the system_server restarts more than 5 times in 5 minutes,” or if “a persistent system app crashes more than 5 times in 30 seconds.” After that, Rescue Party escalates through a series of actions to recover your beloved device. Even if Google doesn’t specifically mention how these fixes word, it’s more likely about procedures that you know such as wiping cache and Dalvik.

Each time Rescue Party applies one of these fixes, it will let your Android handset attempt to boot again. If the system_server or a persistent system app continues to crash, then it will try a more aggressive fix. If nothing works, Google says that Android Oreo Rescue Party will finally reboot the device into recovery mode and prompt the user to perform a factory reset, as a last resort.

Also keep in mind that the Rescue Party feature which is enabled by default in Oreo will hopefully help Android users getting rid of the software-related reboot loops and avoiding dealing with Google’s terrible out-of-warranty return program. However, it won’t be able to fix any hardware-related issues, so make no confusion about that.