Ars Technica Android O Review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
>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.
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.