Through an AMA on the official OnePlus forums yesterday, the company’s Beta Project Manager, Adam Krisko, confirmed that none of the company’s smartphones, including the OnePlus 5T, OnePlus 5, OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T, will receive support for Project Treble. Answering a query about whether the company is looking to bring Project Treble to any of its smartphones that have been released over the past couple of years, Krisko simply stated that OnePlus does not plan to support the feature without elaborating any further.
While OnePlus has generally been known to be a power user-oriented, developer-friendly smartphone vendor, this recent announcement has hit a sour note with many, who are crying foul over what seems to be an arbitrary decision from the company. While Google has mandated that all phones shipping with Android Oreo out-of-the-box must support Project Treble if they are to have access to Google’s services, the OnePlus 5T only comes with Android Nougat, and as such, is exempt from the decree. While the OnePlus 3 and 3T just started receiving Oreo earlier this week, the 5 and 5T are expected to also get it fairly soon.
Announced as a headline feature of Android Oreo a few months earlier, Project Treble seeks to modularize Android by separating the operating system’s core framework from low-level, vendor-specific code. With the implementation of this idea, Google has looked to address one of the long-standing criticisms of Android – the inordinate delay in pushing out critical updates. With Project Treble, vendors should be able to roll out core OS updates to their phones without re-optimizing their own code. While Treble is baked into Android Oreo, OEMs can also, in theory, update devices with Android Nougat (or older) to support the feature. Although, it will be interesting to see how many non-Oreo devices actually end up getting Treble eventually, seeing as even Oreo-infused devices are struggling to get it thanks to arbitrary implementation by vendors like OnePlus.
