Android mobile operating system is known for its slow updates. Google's attempt to solve this problem, is by bringing 'Project Treble.'
In a nutshell, Treble separates all low-level drivers, like those from vendors, away from the rest and the core of the Android system. What this means, users in waiting for updated chipset drivers before updating their mobile device is no longer required, as long as the drivers support Treble.
Project Treble a major restructuring of Android that is part of 8.0 Oreo.
Treble is a welcome move, and here is where the XDA forums that have been the central gathering of custom ROM development went to work Android developers on the forum are known to be those that kept older Android smartphones alive by creating custom ROMS, sometimes years after devices were abandoned by the device maker.
The problem is, although most manufacturers release bootloader unlocking methods, the frequent delays in kernel source releases has limited custom ROM development on many smartphones.
With Project Treble, things should change, because with it, the time it takes to port an AOSP ROM onto a device should take only days, not anymore weeks or months.
Usually, Android team publishes the open-source code for the latest release to the world, using the following steps:
- Silicon manufacturers (Qualcomm, Samsung Exynos, etc.) modify the new release for their specific hardware.
- Silicon manufacturers pass that modified new release to device makers.
- Device makers (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc.) modify the new release again as needed.
- Device makers work with carriers to test and certify the new release.
- Device makers and carriers make the new release available to users.
These are the reasons why Android is so fragmented.
With Treble, Google eliminate the first and second procedures by re-architecting Android to make it "easier, faster and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android."
"On the Android team, we view each dessert release as an opportunity to make Android better for our users and our ecosystem partners," explains Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble team lead. "One thing we’ve consistently heard from our device-maker partners is that updating existing devices to a new version of Android is incredibly time consuming and costly."
Although steps three to five of the above remain, Google and silicon manufacturers have created a stable "vendor interface" that the hardware and OS can plug into.
This isn't the first time Google has promised to improve Android's update situation. Previously, Google has the "Android Update Alliance", group of OEMs that promised to do a better job at delivering updates. But this didn't go well as expected.