You may have heard about Google’s Project Treble. The project treble intends to make it easier, cheaper and faster for the Android device manufacturers to keep their phones updated.
You may know very well that regular OS updates for Android phones have been a big issue and most of the manufacturers don’t support their phones with recent Android OS versions. Google’s project treble has been devised keeping this in mind and in a way to encourage manufacturers to keep their phones updated. From Google’s official blog post.
The Android 8.0 release includes Project Treble, 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. Treble is for all new devices launching with Android 8.0 and beyond
If you will read the above paragraph from Google’s blog post you can notice that Treble will be available only on Android devices launching with Android Oreo and beyond. Since Nokia 8 was launched running Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box it won’t support Project Treble.
With HMD’s guaranteed OS update promise for two years, it doesn’t matter at all for end users or customers like us, as we will get updates with or without Treble. HMD is the one who will have to put more resources into testing and pushing the update to Nokia 8 and other Nokia Android smartphones released running Nougat out of the box. HMD CPO Juho just confirmed this on Twitter.
Treble requires 2 conditions to be met:
1) Adapt to the new Vendor Interface implementation
2) Standalone Vendor partition to contain Vendor Implementation
Nokia 8 does not have separate Vendor partition in ROM space and the partitioning cannot be done OTA.— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) December 5, 2017
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
This also means that all future Nokia Android smartphones like Nokia 9 launching with Android Oreo out of the box will come with Project Treble support.