Last week OnePlus was kind enough to explain to their discerning users why their current OnePlus devices won’t receive Project Treble support with the latest Oreo update. In short, adding Project Treble support necessitates a free partition, large enough to accommodate the OEM’s proprietary stuff separately, so that the main Android OS framework can be updated without reworking the whole vendor-specific code. Though we are yet to see Project Treble in action, Google claims that this should address one of Android’s main shortcomings and considerably speed up the whole updating process. As an extra treat, Project Treble support enables the enthusiastic XDA members to boot a generic, functional, pure AOSP ROM compiled from source with all ease, and enjoy the next iteration of Android way earlier than the OEM’s release.
However, adding Project Treble support is only mandatory for newly released phones that ship with Oreo out-of-the-box. This means that OEMs are not required to add Project Treble support to this year’s [flagship] phones that ship with last year’s Nougat, since most likely there won’t be a free unutilized partition to contain their proprietary code. Surprisingly some companies have managed to add Project Treble support via their OTA Oreo update to their flagships like Essential and Huawei, which begged the following question. Why OnePlus—a company that claims to care for the tech enthusiasts the most—hasn’t done the same? Thankfully OnePlus has issued a public statement in their last AMA session stating that there isn’t any free usable partition to contain their code since that wasn’t necessary for Nougat.
While that fairly convinced the majority of the curious crowd, some of the folks at XDA were curious to verify OnePlus’s claim themselves. After some careful inspection of the partition table, and with the aid of some commands in the recovery mode, XDA recognized developer joshuous was able to confirm the existence of a usable, entirely free 1531 MB sector on his OnePlus 3, which deems OnePlus’ claim almost totally invalid. This means that one of the major prerequisites of adding Project Treble support—the presence of a usable free partition—is already satisfied, leaving only the OEM to rework their HALs and separate their vendor-specific stuff from the Android OS framework.
While one could argue that this is extremely uneconomical and would require a lot of time and effort, it is a bit weird to see OnePlus giving the cold shoulder to their customers, who mainly bought the device to enjoy some custom ROM goodness. Things get even more frustrating when you consider the fact that other companies, like Huawei and the fairly new Essential, are already adding support of Project Treble with their Oreo updates—companies that haven’t taken the pride of putting their tech-enthusiast customers first.
Featured-image: Android Central
