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OnePlus Will NOT Support Project Treble Quick Android Update
Paul Briden
22/11/2017 – 5:20pm
OnePlus will not support Google’s Project Treble quick update feature on the OnePlus 5T and below
OnePlus has confirmed, in its usual fashion via its own official forums, that the company won’t be supporting Google’s Project Treble for its current devices – this isn’t just older phones like the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T, however, but also the new-ish OnePlus 5 and its brand new OnePlus 5T variant, both of which shipped with Android Nougat.
When Google first announced Project Treble, the implication was that any device updated to Android Oreo would unlock this magical new feature.
But now OnePlus appears to have confirmed that it’s an opt-in feature for phones being updated to Oreo from older versions, rather than an automatic upgrade.
Manufacturers will seemingly have to choose to enable Project Treble on their updated phones in much the same way that Adoptive Storage – the ability for a phone to use a microSD card as if it was built-in memory – was added to Android Marshmallow but then, to some controversy, NOT implemented by Samsung or LG on their flagships for that year even when they shipped with Marshmallow onboard.
Having said that, it appears that for phones launching with Oreo or higher onboard they will be required by Google to feature Project Treble from the off.
But what’s Project Treble and why should you care? Well…you may not, of course.
But put simply, Project Treble is a Google driven initiative which will arrive aboard Android Oreo; it’s a bid to counter Android’s age-old problem of fragmentation and slow updates to the latest software going forward.
The long and the short of it is that it will allow Android OEMs to circumvent component hardware manufacturer approval when pushing new Android builds to end users. For example, with a new Samsung or HTC phone running a Qualcomm processor, normally the phone makers would have to wait for Qualcomm to develop firmware support infrastructure for the new build; with Project Treble, they won’t need to and can push Android Oreo and later builds quicker.
There will of course still be many other hurdles to overcome for update pushing, even with this one being removed (most glaringly being carrier network approval, which always takes aaaaages).
Thus, OnePlus has basically said that it won’t participate in Project Treble for all its phones released so far. As they will all be updated to Android Oreo, OnePlus is therefore not obligated to use Project Treble on these devices – and it’s choosing not to.
Going forward though, with the assumed OnePlus 6 in 2018, OnePlus will have to use Project Treble on that model and beyond if it wants to give its users at least a relatively current build of Android at launch – either Oreo or whatever Android P is dubbed – which it’ll need to if it wants to be competitive.
At the other end of the spectrum, Google is enabling Project Treble on the first-gen Pixel phones updating to Android Oreo currently. Likewise, Essential has confirmed it intends to with the Essential PH-1.