If you remembe Google announced Project Treble before I/O 2017 to address one of Android’s biggest challenges, the device update problem 5 years ago. With Android 8 (Oreo), Android system was redesigned to make upgrades easier, faster and cheaper for manufacturers. So what is this Project Treble?
Project Treble
It allows developers to design updates that work on billions of phones and tablets without having to tune in for each type of device. Before Project Treble, the Android framework and device vendor were overhauled to update devices. Both Android framework was updated and device vendor was reworked. This was quite difficult for companies to update. With a new vendor interface, Project Treble decouples vendor implementations (device-specific software) from the Android OS framework. There is no official vendor interface in Android 7.x and earlier, so device manufacturers had to update a lot of Android code to update devices to newer versions of Android.
Thanks to Project Treble, companies have become faster and easier to update. Samsung phones, which received very few Android updates before Project Treble, are now getting more updates than Google’s phones.
Treble provides a stable new vendor interface for device manufacturers to access hardware-specific parts of the Android code, so that device manufacturers can simply update the Android OS framework and skip chip manufacturers directly to provide new Android version. With Project Treble, the necessary device frameworks were completely moved to the device’s vendor. In this way, while the companies were updating, they only released the new Android framework, vendor remained the same. The photo below explains it.
GSI (Generic System Image) is completely the product of this project. As we said above, if you have a treble vendor, your company will give the updates as GSI. For example, Xiaomi gives MIUI updates to most of its devices as GSI / SGSI. In fact, this is exactly the purpose of the project. Instead of getting individual builds for each device for updates, the android framework is prepared and released to treble supported device. You can find our topic on GSI here. Today, there is almost no device that doesn’t have Project Treble. Google has done a great job. Stay tuned to follow agenda and learn new things.
