One of the things that Apple and iOS can hold over the Android ecosystem is how fast OS updates on iPhones and iPad are installed. However, compared to the abundance of potential hardware available in the Android ecosystem, Apple is restricted to a relatively smaller set.
Qualcomm and Google have announced they’ll be working to expand Project Treble, Google’s ambitious multiyear project that aims to simplify OS updates so it’s easier for device manufacturers to upgrade phones and tablets to new Android versions without worrying about Qualcomm’s chipset-specific software.
The goal is to make it even easier for users to get the latest version of Android on their phones (something that isn’t always guaranteed) and to ensure that new Qualcomm chips will support four Android OS updates and four years of security updates a huge leap forward from what most Android phones usually offer. Such a feat, if actually accomplished, would put Android smartphones closer to Apple’s iPhones in terms of long-term software support.
Google explained in a blog post today, when an Android OS release happens, Google publishes a generic image from the open-source version of Android that is guaranteed to be backwards-compatible with the prior three versions of vendor implementations. New devices must also have vendor implementations that are compatible with the generic images.
“This is the primary vehicle for reducing fragmentation within the OS framework,” Google said.
“Besides the reuse of a vendor implementation across OS updates, the Treble architecture also facilitates the re-use of the same OS framework code across different vendor implementations.”
However, this picture gets much murkier for a company like Qualcomm, who needs to support many of its different system-on-chip (SoC) products, and device makers purchasing the silicon.
“The result is that three years beyond the launch of a chipset, the SoC vendor would have to support up to six combinations of OS framework software and vendor implementations. The engineering costs associated with this support limited the duration for which SoC vendors offered Android OS software support on a chipset,” Google said.
“The crux of the problem was that, while device requirements were never retroactive, the requirements for SoCs were. For example on Android Pie, SoCs had to support two versions of the Camera HAL API on a chipset if it was used to support new device launches and upgrades.”
After a year of work with Qualcomm, Google said it has made changes that will allow chip makers to use the same vendor implementation for SoCs for the supported lifetime of the device that being four years consisting of the original Android OS version and three OS upgrades — as well as the search giant also using the OS framework across multiple Qualcomm chips.
“Going forward, all new Qualcomm mobile platforms that take advantage of the no-retroactivity principle for SoCs will support four Android OS versions and four years of security updates,” Google said.
The catch is that it’ll take a few years until we can see what, if any, benefits this program creates for accelerating the Android update cycle or extending device longevity. That’s because Qualcomm is only making this commitment for future devices, starting with the upcoming Snapdragon 888
