Project Treble is one of those things Google announced recently that many Android users are excited about. To give you a brief summary of Project Treble, Kellen has written a couple pieces on the subject, so I’ll let him explain it.
This excerpt is from a post we wrote about how Project Treble should increase Android OS updates.
The basic idea behind Project Treble is that Google is ‘re-architecting Android to make it easier, faster and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android.’ How are they going to do that? By specifically separating out the ‘vendor implementation’ portion of Android, which is the lower-level software that is controlled by silicon makers, the guys who make the processors and chipsets for devices.
Naturally, many Android phone buyers have been anxious to hear from OEMs that would announce complete support of Project Treble. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been all too many, and apparently, it’s not because they simply don’t want to.
In a recent AMA on its own forums, OnePlus laid out a massive answer as to why OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T owners won’t see any type of Project Treble implementation on their devices.
Project Treble requires a storage partition, by which the Android framework and vendor image are separated. However, because partitions were not required of Android N and previous versions of Android, all of our current devices do not feature a partition. According to our tests, if we were to modify the partition layout via OTA there is a risk that devices will brick during the partitioning. We feel this poses too great a risk for our community of users, which is why we have decided not to implement Project Treble on current OnePlus devices.
As you can see, it’s not that OnePlus doesn’t want to support Project Treble, it’s just they don’t think it’s worth the risk at this time. If implementing a change such as Treble would result in bricked phones, I can’t say I blame them.
While Project Treble won’t be getting any love this time around, OnePlus did point out that their update history has been quite good, with select OnePlus owners even able to download and play with Oreo.
Sad to hear this news, OnePlus owners?
// OnePlus
Isn’t Treble a requirement for any phones that ship with Oreo? So One Plus can opt out on this device but all future devices will have to support Treble to maintain Google certification, correct?
Only if they ship with 8.0 or newer.
That’s what I said.
Oreo IS 8.0
I know. And again. Only if they ship with 8.0 or newer. They don’t have to have treble is they release with 7.x or older
If you want faster update, go with Pixel/Sony/Essential. Easy & simple. I moved to Pixel just for the Android version Update! Thats crazy! I should have been an Apple fanboy… I would not miss any update in 3-4 years.
Please droid-life, switch to WordPress comments. This is going to get bad.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a1926bef5ed33a3ccb2c16401ddc7e0057827631dceba6f9cf5836e57b3cf6f1.jpg
Can’t be any worse than that Taboola garbage that we are already used to!
“While Project Treble won’t be getting any love this time around, OnePlus did point out that their update history has been quite good”
>>>>> https://www.dev.droid-life.com/2017/08/11/android-o-last-update-oneplus-3-3t/
They can’t sell new phones every 6 months if the phone you already bought makes you happy and gets updates,
I’m so glad companies like LG and Samsung don’t also sell new flagships every six months. How dare OnePlus.
More like we don’t want to update our devices for a longer period of time than we already don’t.
Treble won’t matter to oem pushed updates. They will still push as many updates as they already do.
Considering that Google, Essential, and Huawei have successfully updated Nougat devices to Oreo with Treble, I find this justification to be pretty weak. And Huawei can’t even make a battery. Apple converted their entire filesystem from HFS+ to APFS during an update without any major issues as well.
If they’re still operating at the startup level in terms of dev maturity, I’d give them a pass. They’re doing pretty good up to this point especially since OP has a loyal following that likely is not to appeal to the masses on the scale of Huawei or Sammy or Apple that can throw hundreds of millions into R&D.
Same owner as oppo…
They are not a small company as they like people to believe
This isn’t really all that surprising honestly. I remember Google saying that devices would need to ship with support for Treble so hoping to get it in an update was already a lost cause.
“OnePlus did point out that their update history has been quite good…”
Um, as a current OnePlus 3T owner, I assure you their update history is terrible. Dropping support for major OS updates after a year is not “quite good.”
I can’t wait to get rid of this POS phone. Sadly, the penguin Pixel 2 XL I was expecting today isn’t arriving until tomorrow, so I’ve got at least one more day with this turd.
Don’t be blue like Tobias, it’s worth the wait!
Don’t be blue like Tobias, it’s worth the wait!
Yeah x2
AKA “Just wait another 3 months for the OnePlus 5T”O” for an extra $50 and project treble included.
They must have known that to be the case with Android N vs. O. Why didn’t OnePlus launch the 5T with Oreo so they could implement Treble? Did they decide to launch with Nougat so they could use it as an excuse? I genuinely want to know.
Hardware was already done at that point
The hardware being finalized shouldn’t matter. They could’ve partitioned the storage before they loaded the OS. I don’t believe it’s any different than it would be on a regular hard drive, or even a thumb drive. Now OnePlus is right in that you wouldn’t want to attempt to partition the storage via an OTA, but they announced Project Treble in the middle of the year, and I’d guess their hardware partners knew about it before it was announced. So there’s really no reason the 5T couldn’t have shipped without it.
This is a really dumb excuse, they should know better. Even if they didn’t launch with Oreo, they knew project treble was coming. They should have set up the dual partition in nougat and had it ready prior to the Oreo update.
The other point is if project treble makes updating phones easier, why wouldn’t you want that ? It’ll cut down your development costs and make it easier and faster to update your devices.
So they want to keep doing it the hard way ? Ok.