After OnePlus, Nokia's current devices too won't support Project Treble

After OnePlus' announcement that none of its smartphones, including the latest 5T will support Project Treble, looks like even Nokia is trudging the same line.

Project Treble, introduced as part of Android 8.0 Oreo represents 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."

It's basically meant to fix the problem of fragmentation by separating the vendor implementation (device-specific, lower-level software written by silicon manufacturers) from the Android OS framework via a new vendor interface that will allow Google and OEMs to update the OS without having to reconfigure all the lower level hardware parts.

While this may sound as a very useful update, it may leave your phone bricked i.e. as good as a piece of brick. The reason as OnePlus explains is-

"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."

The case is same with all the current Nokia devices including Nokia 8, Nokia 6, Nokia 5, Nokia 3 and Nokia 2 that were launched with Android 7.x Nougat and won't support Treble when they get their Android 8.0 Oreo updates.

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

It is important to note that while Project Treble implementation is mandatory for devices launching with Android 8.0 out of the box, the same is not true for the ones with previous OS version. But that doesn't mean none of the older devices will support Project Treble. Essential and Huawei are supporting Treble for the Essential Phone and Honor 8 Pro, respectively despite having launched them with Nougat.