14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just announced a new project that the company has been working on, one that would make it easier for Android-running smartphones to be updated to the latest version. Project Treble will arrive on smartphones running Android O and beyond.
Google stated that the process of updating an Android smartphone to the latest version is time consuming and costly for smartphone makers, which is why the market is so fragmented. The tech giant’s attempt at solving this is Project Treble, which Google says is “the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.”
The life of an Android release requires multiple steps that must be fulfilled. Firstly, the Android team publishes the open-source code for the latest release. Then, chip manufacturers make modifications to the release to fit their specific hardware, and pass the modified version to device makers. After this, smartphone manufacturers and carriers test and certify the new release before making it available to users.
Android updates should arrive sooner thanks to Project Treble
Project Treble aims at making it easier for manufacturers to configure and update devices to the latest Android version, by using the Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) that developers use to make their apps available to a plenitude of devices.
Project Treble aims at separating the vendor implementation from the Android OS Framework and thus ensure a broader compatibility with the specific Android version. To achieve this, Google is introducing a new vendor interface that would reduce the work of manufacturers and make it easier to update the current Android version.
Google has announced that Project Treble will be available to all new devices running Android O and beyond. The architecture already runs on the Developer Preview of O for Pixel smartphones.
Google is also urging device partners to move their code changes to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Sony and Qualcomm already added dozens of features and bug fixes to Android O, which means that the companies can directly use the patches with each new release of Android.
