ZTE has been in the news a lot in recent months, largely in part thanks to sanctions placed on the company by the U.S. government. When those sanctions were lifted, the company returned with a bang by announcing their long-awaited ZTE Axon 9 Pro. Its predecessor, the ZTE Axon 7, is still one of the company's most popular devices. When it launched alongside the OnePlus 3, nobody could really decide which smartphone was truly the best in the mid-range price point. Before the U.S. sanctions were enacted, ZTE was testing the Android Oreo update for the Axon 7 in closed beta. Now that those sanctions were lifted, device owners are finally getting the much-awaited update to Android Oreo.

However, it's not without its issues. In fact, it appears that the update is basically the same as the last closed beta version with an updated security patch level (July 2018). According to users on Reddit, the latest version of the Android Oreo closed beta for the ZTE Axon 7 featured overheating problems, data connection issues, missing Google Daydream support, and more.

Strangely, this update is not being distributed via an OTA update - you'll need to side-load it via an SD card. This, unfortunately, means you'll have to wipe your device's data to install the update. This is reportedly because of encryption issues that beta users faced with the closed Android Oreo beta update, where no matter what pin was entered, the device's /data partition would not decrypt if upgraded directly from Android Nougat.

Users who don't care about Daydream support can give the update a try, however, the other aforementioned issues may still exist. If you face data connection issues, you can try rebooting your device as that appears to be the only way to fix it. If you update and find that there are too many issues with the update, you should check out some of the custom ROMs on our ZTE Axon 7 forums.


Download Android Oreo update for the ZTE Axon 7