The Essential Phone will be updated directly to Android 8.1 Oreo (instead of 8.0 Oreo)

If you own an Essential Phone, we have important news to share with you - both good, and bad. The good news is that Essential is updating its smartphone from Android 7.1 Nougat directly to Android 8.1 Oreo, thus skipping on the initially-promised update to the older version of Oreo (8.0). The bad news is that this is delaying the public release of the update "by a couple of weeks." 

According to Essential, Android 8.0 Oreo includes some stability issues that shouldn't be present in version 8.1 - that's why a direct update to 8.1 makes more sense. That being said, the company currently doesn't have an exact date for when all Essential Phone owners will be able to download Android 8.1 Oreo, but this should happen sometime in February anyway.

Meanwhile, Essential is fine-tuning Android 8.1, and will launch a beta build for interested users to test it and provide feedback. Hopefully, everything goes as planned, and the final Oreo update will be available to everyone soon.       

source: Essential (Twitter)