Google unleashes Project Treble for 4 years smartphones support | Hacker News Reader

Google unleashes Project Treble for 4 years smartphones support

android-developers.googleblog.com

39 pointsphh16 comments

But their very own Pixel XL2 is now off support after 3 years. Very disappointing. It's good for another 2-3 years easily.

Looking at this on a pixel 2. I even bought another batter for when this one no longer holds a charge...

Bet the 3 doesn't go the same way.

More modern hardware.

The key part of this announcement for me is the last sentence, where they announce a deal with Qualcomm for extended security update support.

While having compatible hardware APIs is clearly needed to get new Android versions out, we need devices to receive security updates promptly for their whole lifetime. That means for the claimed 4 years of support, you'll need monthly patches (since many of these vulnerabilities are critical and exploitable, and newer devices will get patches monthly).

I didn't see any suggestion of security patches for SoC components for the full 4 years, just "longer".

Another question this raises will be how many devices will launch a year or more into their supported lifespan - launching last year's SoC this year - and thus reducing their lifespan for the user.

From an environmental and sustainability perspective, we need to lengthen support periods, but from a commercial perspective, chipset vendors want to sell the next shiny chipset. Getting Treble somewhere towards ACPI/UEFI (you can boot Windows 10 or Linux 5.10 on pretty much any x86_64 system, even if the motherboard maker has abandoned it) as a standard hardware layer is one small step towards that, but there's still a long road ahead I fear.

> The key part of this announcement for me is the last sentence, where they announce a deal with Qualcomm for extended security update support.

... in exchange for no longer having to upgrade their drivers. In my opinion they are the winner here, they have much less work than before.

> From an environmental and sustainability perspective, we need to lengthen support periods, but from a commercial perspective, chipset vendors want to sell the next shiny chipset. Getting Treble somewhere towards ACPI/UEFI (you can boot Windows 10 or Linux 5.10 on pretty much any x86_64 system, even if the motherboard maker has abandoned it) as a standard hardware layer is one small step towards that, but there's still a long road ahead I fear.

I agree, though it's hardly as simple.

We've stuck to Gbps ethernet for a decade now so drivers have long been included mainline. But we're progressing on LTE capabitilies at every new SoC, so it requires new drivers. On "PC" (server, desktops), the only thing that evolves that need drivers is the graphic card, so keeping up with the driver is ok.

My understanding is that Google (or rather Android) wants to fix this with Fuchsia: OEMs will provide "user-space"-only drivers and Fuschsia will guarantee ABI compatibility forever. That's really not the way ChromeOS people do things though, who prefer integrating drivers into mainline Linux, and so far ChromeOS people have a much better track record than Android at upgrading. (Though again it's easier on "PC")

I think the big news here is that Qualcomm SoC releases were a fire and forget operation before this deal.

How could they become the dominant chip maker without providing better after sales support for Linux/Android untill now?

The cynical in me thinks this is related to Google soon releasing their own CPUs.

To me, they are more fire and forget with this change, than without.

Before this, they had to upgrade their stack to be ""state of the art"" for 2 or 3 versions after an SoC release. Now they no longer need to. They only have to fix security flaws, but they don't have to bring any improvement whatsoever.

This is a pretty complicated subject, but the global TL;DR, is that until now, OEMs required support from all of Google, SoC vendor, ODM to manage major Android upgrades, and OEM to manage to upgrade to newer Android versions. This was supposedly fix by Project Treble, but until now Google prevented this.

So with this, OEMs no longer require support from SoC vendor and ODM to manage to upgrade to a newer Android version. They can keep the drivers provided originally by the SoC vendor and ODM, and "simply" upgrade only Android framework.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25351189 for the complaint this is addressing

My opinion is this is a very welcome move. But I don't expect OEMs to greatly improve their device's support liftime: the industry is still not incentivized towards supporting a device for 4 years. On that point, please note how the SoC mentioned is amongst the highest-end. Don't expect low-end devices to follow suit.

As a side-effect: - It's likely the number of new features on a older SoC will drop (for instance I think we wouldn't have WPA3 on SDM 855 under such a scheme) - Open-source community support will become harder. At the moment, a flagship released with Android 8 will get Android 10 drivers. With this, a flagship released with Android 11 will remain on Android 11 drivers forever. Community support is easier with the most recent drivers, so we'll loose that.

I've heard this spiel now for what seems like ten years. Meanwhile I'm on last year's flagship from the world's largest smartphone manufacturer and I still haven't received an update to the operating system released three months ago. Pathetic. I've stopped believing it.

How long have you used android?

Samsung updating their phones 3-6 months after Google is a good thing.

Android releases are buggy as hell the first few months. If pixel users want to act unpaid beta tester that's fine, but I don't think Samsung costumers would think likewise.

Ten years or so? Since Android 2, I think. I've had Google phones and tablets and I found the non-beta releases of Android very solid. Certainly not buggy as hell.

Now that I think about it, I know many people, including me, who don't know how long the support for their smartphone is. At some point I guess you just stop receiving security updates but how would a regular user know and notice this means they lost security support? All people I know use the phone as long as it works or they just want a prettier one with a better camera. I've never heard someone say "oh shit, my phone is off support, now I have to buy a new one".

This being said, is someone implying having shorter support for a phone increases overall sales?

>Despite the events throughout 2020, there is a continued momentum among our partners to either launch their devices on Android 11 or offer Android 11 OTAs on their devices earlier.

What the fuck does covid have to do with upgrading an android phone.

Our company was doing this transition back in 2018. It is quite straightforward for userland drivers, but how are they upgrading kernel drivers?

I find Android intuitive in a lot of ways but Google keeps screwing up features with every release. I'll still stick to Android at least till Pixel 4a 5G but not sure how much longer. I wish the Android UX team would go on a sabbatical for a while.

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