Let’s be honest; the excitement surrounding new versions of Google’s Android operating system is always tempered by the realisation all of those features are probably 12 months away from arriving on most phones.
As of May 2, almost a year after it was first announced, only 7.1% of Android devices worldwide are running Android Nougat (7.0 and 7.1).
Google is acutely aware of this and believes it has found a way for manufacturers to speed the process up for the forthcoming Android O update.
Google is describing its Project Treble platform, announced in a blog post today, as a “modular base for Android,” which is the “biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.”
The idea is to streamline the process for silicon makers, manufacturers who’ve told Google “updating existing devices to a new version of Android is incredibly time consuming and costly.”
For reference, here's what the update process currently looks like:
Google says Project Treble will make the Android framework more like the apps landscape, where a developer can write a single app that can run on millions of different pieces of hardware.
In the blog post Google adds: “With a stable vendor interface providing access to the hardware-specific parts of Android, device makers can choose to deliver a new Android release to consumers by just updating the Android OS framework without any additional work required from the silicon manufacturers”
Google says it’ll release more information about Project Treble this summer, but says it’s already built into the Android O preview.
It’s likely we’ll hear more about this at Google I/O next week.
