Google announced its Project Treble last year to enable its hardware partners to deliver Android updates faster. It’s no secret that Android updates aren’t rolled out as quickly as users would want them to which is why it’s a very fragmented operating system, Android 8.0 Oreo is the latest iteration of the platform and while it has been out for almost six months, it powers just one percent of all Android devices. Unfortunately, the Oreo update that was released today for the Galaxy S8 doesn’t bring support for Project Treble.
Project Treble is a feature that Google introduced with Android Oreo. It lets OEMs the most recent OS update from Google without having to wait for chip partners like Qualcomm to support it.
Google said last year that it was working to bring Project Treble to existing and older Android devices. All devices that ship with Android Oreo out of the box will come with the feature enabled, but existing devices that get updated to Oreo aren’t guaranteed to receive support for Project Treble.
That’s precisely what’s happened with the Galaxy S8. Samsung released Oreo for the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ today and it has been confirmed that the update doesn’t bring support for Project Treble.
Samsung could add it at a later date through a subsequent firmware update but with the Galaxy S9 set to be its first device to ship with Oreo out of the box, it’s likely that it will keep Project Treble support limited to that device at least for the foreseeable future.