The Android Oreo Beta for the Galaxy S8 and S8+ has been available for nearly two weeks. Samsung started rolling out the Beta 2 update late last week in the UK, and just yesterday in the US. Unfortunately, the US version of the update firmware (G955USQU1ZQK6) experienced a critical bug with the phone app at launch. As a result, Samsung has completely pulled the US Beta 2 update for the time being.
It appears the Oreo Beta 2 update began in the US around 12 PM EST on November 13. Shortly after, many users over on Reddit reported a bug that completely killed cell reception. The issue seems to be a repeated crash of the com.android.phone process. User CitizenV noted a possible fix for the crash:
Go into Settings -> Apps -> overflow menu -> Show System Apps. Then scroll down to Phone -> Storage and clear data. I had three separate Phone entries I had to do. Should clear it up after a reboot
We downloaded the Beta 2 update last night and experienced this issue on our device. The fix suggested above did work in solving the issue for us, but others are reporting that their issues persisted after reboot. It is important to note that there are several variants of the S8 participating in the beta, and cell signal can certainly be affected differently on each SKU.
In response to these widespread issues with the phone app and cellular reception, Samsung has completely pulled the Beta 2 update in the US for users on T-Mobile, Sprint, and the Unlocked model. The beta team posted a message in the Samsung Members app to let users know that they can expect a new update soon.
We will certainly update this post when Samsung starts pushing out the revised update. In the meantime, we’re getting to work looking at the new features in Beta 2 and checking to see if any of the bugs are fixed. Did you grab the update before it was pulled? Let us know if you had any issues in the comments!
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