Update 9/20/17: For a more thorough analysis of what Rescue Party can and cannot do, please read this article.

Most of the new features of Android Oreo has been known about since the company released its first developer preview for Android O. We've been talking about the new features here on XDA for months and yet there are always new goodies to be discovered once the full update is released. One of these new features is called the Rescue Party and its goal is to help you to recover an Android Oreo smartphone or tablet that has run into bootloop issues.

Almost all of us here at XDA have been there before too. We try to install an incompatible or problematic modification, or just run into a bit of bad luck and then our device is stuck in a bootloop. This can often be a literal bootloop and it will cause the device to boot to a certain period and then simply reboot. Other times people will see their device getting stuck during the boot cycle and this is also commonly referred to as a bootloop within sectors of the community.

Google specifies two different methods and cases where the Rescue Party is triggered, so this will only happen in certain circumstances and won't be a fix-all for everything. Still, this is quite interesting and could go a long way to preventing people from submitting support tickets for warranty inquiries. This will also be great for OEMs since the Rescue Party feature could fix the issue the customer was having and thus save their employees from having to deal with it.

Rescue party triggers when system_server restarts more than 5 times in 5 minutes or a persistent system app crashes more than 5 times in 30 seconds. So once Android Oreo detects a crash loop, it then escalates a series of actions to recover the device. This starts out by processing the task associated with that level, and attempts to let the device recover from the situation. Each level is progressively more aggressive and will clear/reset certain things.

This whole process ends when the device finally boots as it should, or by the device booting directly into recovery mode so you can perform a factory reset.


Source: Google