Android’s fragmentation issue has been a sore point of discussion for Google. This issue leaves a large number of new features – that each new version of Android brings – unavailable on most phones.
However, Google is trying to fix that with Project Treble.
Project Treble tries to ensure that phones, other than Google’s own Pixel, come with easier upgrades to new software versions.
What is Project Treble?
To achieve this, Treble lays a common ground of “Original Vendor Implementation”, with a separate component for the core Android OS and the custom OEM skin built on top of it.
In layman terms, with Project Treble, the base Android OS will be updated with Google’s Pixel phones while keeping the skins like TouchWiz, EMUI and others intact, leaving them up to Samsung, Huawei and others to update on their own time.
This succeeds the previous setup, where the Hardware Abstraction Layers (HALS) and the Android framework used to be together in the system partition of your phone.
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This made it more difficult to launch new updates, especially if you were an OEM. It was fairly common to see OEMs skip software updates in between and jump to the latest version directly. The practice of lax updates was pretty common, with Samsung also guilty of it.
List of Treble Supporting Phones
Now, XDA Developers has also uncovered a list of phones which will be included in Google’s Project Treble, thus updating faster than the rest of the Android world. The list of phones includes:
- Google Pixel
- Google Pixel XL
- Huawei Mate 9
- Huawei Mate 10 Lite
- Honor 7X
- Honor 8 Pro
- Honor 9
- Honor 9i
- Huawei P10
- Huawei P10 Lite
- Huawei P10 Plus
- ASUS Zenfone 4
- Razer Phone
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro
These phones will be joined by all the recent releases of phones running on Android Oreo, since the software update comes with Treble support by default, hence, laying the groundwork for any major future updates to come after Oreo.
Via GSMArena
Google took a big step with making Treble support a part of Oreo’s CTS. But I kinda wish that they’d take it one step further and make it mandatory for every device running Oreo (meaning phones which were updated to Oreo) to also support Treble. That way jerk-ish oems (looking at you LG) don’t skimp out with older flagships like the V20.
Fully agreed. I guess, just matter of time Saqeef!
S9 and S9+ also included
One Plus 3 not included…… Ohkay.