Current Nokia phones will not support Project Treble

New Nokia phones come with clean Android and a promise of fast updates, but it turns out they are still not equals to the Pixels – at least not as far as Project Treble is concerned. Here’s the deal: all current Nokia models (which launched with Android 7.x Nougat) will not get Treble.

While it is mandatory for devices launching with Oreo, it requires extra work for devices that came to life with an older version. It’s not impossible – the original Pixels got Treble (of course), but so did the Essential Phone along with the Huawei Honor 9 and Honor 8 Pro. Others – like OnePlus and HMD – are passing on Treble.

That said, HMD is committed to bring the new updates anyway, even though it will have to do more work. It seems that Treble requires a special partitioning of the internal storage that can’t be done over the air.

Note that there is no end user impact. Just means that we do a bit more heavy lifting on engineering to keep you Pure, Secure and Up-to-Date

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) December 5, 2017

What’s the big deal anyway? Well, makers will have a much easier time porting new versions of Android to their phones with Treble in place. And even if they don’t, custom ROMs become a breeze.

Here’s an example from XDA: phhusson created a single system image that runs on phones from three different makers powered by two different chipsets. Most times you can’t even get the same ROM to run on different regional versions of the same phone.

Source | Via