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Ever since the release of the OnePlus 5T, eager fans have been hoping the Chinese company would support Google’s Project Treble initiative, which allows for faster Android OS updates without requiring OEM-level testing. When the company announced none of their current devices would be updated to support Treble, plenty of fans created a Change.org petition to get OnePlus to reconsider.
Now in an AMA held on their forums yesterday, a OnePlus staff member explained his company’s decision not to support Treble at this time.
Project Treble requires a storage partition, by which the Android framework and vendor image are separated. However, because partitions were not required of Android N and previous versions of Android, all of our current devices do not feature a partition. According to our tests, if we were to modify the partition layout via OTA there is a risk that devices will brick during the partitioning. We feel this poses too great a risk for our community of users, which is why we have decided not to implement Project Treble on current OnePlus devices.
Basically, the OnePlus representative is parroting the same reason HMD’s CEO gave yesterday for why Nokia devices won’t support Project Treble, either. Both companies seem to be worried about bricking existing devices if the second partition for Treble support were attempted through an OTA update.
OnePlus further says they’re pleased with their update track record and don’t feel Treble support is necessary since their team is committed to delivering updates and stable major OS upgrades as quickly as possible to end users. They don’t necessarily commit to using Project Treble for future devices either, but instead say they look forward to how it “will evolve to better support devices ahead.”
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