
Ars Technica Android O Review - ditn
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-thoroughly-reviewed/
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ditn
I knew Project Treble was exciting, but this is really interesting:

>Treble promises to change everything. Malchev says that Treble standardizes
Android hardware support to such a degree that generic Android builds compiled
from AOSP can boot and run on every Treble device. In fact, these "raw AOSP"
builds are what will be used for some of the CTS testing Google requires all
Android OEMs to pass in order to license the Google apps—it's not just that
they _should_ work, they are _required_ to work.

Ron paints a rosy future here:

>Custom ROMs shouldn't need to be painstakingly hand-crafted for individual
devices anymore—a single build should be able to cover multiple Treble devices
from multiple manufacturers. Imagine the next time a major new version of
Android is released—on Day One of the AOSP code drop, a single build (or a
small handful of builds) could cover every Treble device with an unlocked
bootloader, with a "download Android 9.0 here" link on XDA or some other
technical website.

If this comes to fruition, the ROM community is going to go nuts. This is
enormously exciting and Oreo will turn out to be a real turning point for
Android.

One thing that is interesting though is the implication that Android updates
will get more iOS-y in the future. By that I mean certain features will be
missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it.

~~~
DCKing
The implications for the ROM community would be amazing. Reading this, the
implication is that the LineageOS project can make _a single build_ that would
work on _all_ Android devices that have 1) Treble support and 2) an unlocked
bootloader. In the text it is in fact implied that Google themselves make such
a 'single' AOSP build/system partition that the device needs to be able to run
to pass Google Play certification.

It would no longer mean device specific builds and hoping your device is
supported. No longer would it mean that you would have to tactically buy
popularish Snapdragon devices to have a chance of some aftermarket support
after the vendor inevitably leaves you. You would be able to run Lineage on
(Exynos-based) Samsung and Huawei phones, which is either impossible or too
much trouble to worth the effort at the moment.

Hell, in theory alternate non Android-based, OSes like PostmarketOS [1] could
write their OS to be compatible with the Android HAL and work with that. Stuff
like this would have likely made Canonical's life in running Ubuntu on Android
devices _much_ easier too.

Vendors could make a system partition with their latest skin version and
distribute it to all their devices, instead of only their flagship ones,
meaning feature updates can be deployed in a much broader way than is done
now. Driver updates will likely still be an issue, but security fixes that
pertain to the Android base can still be deployed.

I really, really hope the implications here turn out to be true, and vendors
don't find a way to fuck this up.

[1]: [http://postmarketos.org/](http://postmarketos.org/)

