The Motorola Moto G5S was launched about a year ago as an upgrade to the Motorola Moto G5 Plus. The Moto G5S Plus featured a larger screen and a dual camera setup, though everything else (including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC) was more or less the same. As such, it didn’t seem like too big of an upgrade. The Motorola Moto G5S Plus found its way into Lenovo’s Motorola update plan for devices receiving the update to Android Oreo, and in February 2018, the company announced that the update was coming soon. While it appeared that the press release was incorrect, users eventually began to receive Android 8.1 Oreo on their devices in Brazil as part of a soak test. Some other Latin American countries got the update as well.
But of course, the update doesn’t appear to be rolling out globally. Motorola still hasn’t rolled out the update worldwide. However, thanks to XDA Senior Member Kamin4ri, you can still get the update on your device by following a guide on our forums. You can actually flash the latest update on any of the Moto G5S models no matter where you are in the world, and you’ll get the August security patch as well. You’ve got to be careful though, and you’ll definitely need to backup all of your data. That includes backing up your EFS partition, as an update going wrong (or wanting to downgrade in the future) can wipe your IMEI.
Flashing this update will also force enable encryption, so if you’ve decrypted your device then the first boot will take a while. Updating will also update your partition table and your bootloader version, both of which can potentially be dangerous. Still, it shouldn’t be too hard to rescue your Moto G5S if needed. You can flash the update in either TWRP or fastboot. Simply follow the instructions in the thread linked below to update your Moto G5S to Android Oreo. It’s a bit late now with Android Pie starting to arrive on many other smartphones, but it’s better late than never.