What if your device maker isn’t supporting Project Treble?

Last week there was a lot of buzz around OnePlus and Nokia announcing that their current lineup of smartphones will not be supporting Project Treble, which left many people perplexed. While there are many who still don't know what exactly is Project Treble, there are others who are feeling jittery about their device maker opting out of the feature even after updating to Android Oreo.

So, what is Project Treble?

Project Treble is "a major re-architect of the Android OS framework designed to make it easier, faster, and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android."

In layman's terms, Treble is a fix for the problem of fragmentation faced by millions of the Android users where in users don't get new Android operating system updates in timely manner. The life of any update consists of five steps namely:

a. The Android team publishes the open-source code for the latest release to the world.

b. Silicon manufacturers, the companies that make the chips that power Android devices, modify the new release for their specific hardware.

c. Silicon manufacturers pass the modified new release to device makers — the companies that design and manufacture Android devices. Device makers modify the new release again as needed for their devices.

d. Device makers work with carriers to test and certify the new release.

e. Device makers and carriers make the new release available to users.

Project Treble changes this cycle with a new vendor interface between the Android OS framework and the vendor implementation, which will allow device makers to deliver a new Android release to consumers by just updating the Android OS framework without any additional work required from the silicon manufacturers.

What if your device isn't supporting Project Treble?

While all devices shipping with Android 8.0 out of the box will be supporting Project treble i.e. automatic updates, mandatory, the same is not true for older flagships that have or will update to Android O. The case in point, OnePlus 3, 3T, 5, 5T as also the current lineup of Nokia devices that will not support the feature. So, is there something that these devices loose on?

Well, honestly, nothing. As Juho Sarvikas says,

Note that there is no end user impact. Just means that we do a bit more heavy lifting on engineering to keep you Pure, Secure and Up-to-Date

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) December 5, 2017

As for OnePlus devices, they are already damn good at updating its hardware to new versions of Android in a timely manner. An open beta of Oreo will be released to the 5 and 5T in late December, and last year's 3 and 3T have already received an update to a stable build of it.