Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

The fragmentation of Android has always been a difficult problem. As an open source system, Android has been customized and beautified by different mobile phone manufacturers, and the whole ecology has been torn apart, resulting in a serious out of sync of upgrades. On this point, nothing breaks down more than Google, the owner of Android.

In fact, Google counts the share of each system version every month. According to the latest data on May 2, the combined share of versions 7.0 and 7.1 of the nougat system, which has been released for nearly a year, accounts for only 7.1%, which is negligible compared with half of the lollipops and marshmallows.

In fact, Google has made some efforts to solve the problem of fragmentation. Last April, for example, Google released a developer preview of Android 7.0 to specific models of the Sony Z3, hoping to bypass third-party vendors and push the new version directly to users. But this idea is not realistic, because Google has limited energy, and there are so many Android manufacturers and models, so it came to nothing in the end.

Now Google has come up with another project to solve the problem of slow Android upgrade, called Project Treble. Next, Wechat ID:leitech will give you a detailed introduction of what this project is.

­the traditional Android upgrade process is extremely inefficient

­Let's start with a look at what the traditional Android upgrade process looks like. To put it simply, this process is divided into the following five steps.

As a first step, Google's Android team will release the open source of the latest version of Android to the outside world.

In the second step, silicon wafer manufacturers, that is, mobile phone component companies, such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, will customize and supplement the source code of Android's new system according to the situation of their mobile phone chips.

In the third step, the mobile phone components company will send the modified code to the manufacturers who design and manufacture Android phones, such as Xiaomi, Yijia, etc. Mobile phone manufacturers will modify this version of the code again according to the needs of their models, such as customizing the kernel, adding their own UI, features, and so on.

Step 4, mobile phone manufacturers and operators work together to test and certify the new system.

In the fifth step, mobile phone manufacturers and operators will push the new system to users in the form of OTA, or provide brushing packages for users to swipe in.

In other words, it is not Google's fault that we have been slow to upgrade our systems in the past, but because different vendors have different system experiences. This is why manufacturers like LG and HTC upgrade very quickly, while some domestic manufacturers either wait for a year and a half to upgrade, or directly preinstall the new system on the new machine. It also reveals that third-party ROM such as Lineage OS can preempt users to experience the new system, which is also related to bypassing the most time-consuming step of vendor customization.

The biggest highlight of ­Treble is the simplification of the upgrade process.

­Google has proposed a compatibility platform for developer API in the compatibility definition document (CDD) and provided a compatibility suite (CTS). Just as developers can write applications that are compatible with any Android, the Treble project has moved this solution from app to the Android framework.

In short, Project Treble is as compatible with Android frameworks as different phones are compatible with App. The core concept is to completely separate the Android framework from the low-level software code written by chip makers such as Qualcomm.

­as mentioned above, the crux of the problem with the slow Android upgrade lies in the customization of the third step by the mobile phone manufacturer, which must be started after the modification of the chip vendor code in the second step. In the future, part of the adaptation of Android's new system by mobile phone manufacturers can begin without waiting for the chip vendor's code. The second and third steps can be carried out synchronously rather than sequentially, and the five steps are simplified to four.

­the following comparison diagram illustrates the intuitive differences before and after the Treble project is enabled. Before enabling it, all the code needs to be updated when the device wants to upgrade the latest Android.

­after enabling, a part of the code as a specific existence does not need to be updated by the vendor, which is more time-saving and efficient.

­the upgrade process for Android 8.0 will launch the Treble project for the first time

­according to Google, Project Treble will be implemented for the first time on the update of Android O, or Android 8.0. At the upcoming Android O conference this week, Google is expected to officially release the Google O operating system, which has been released with a developer preview.

­according to the process, the new system will complete the iteration of the preview version in August-September and release the first official version for users of Pixel and Nexus models to upgrade. The vast majority of third-party vendors will also plan to start adapting to Android 8.0 at that time. According to the progress of the Treble project, there should be a big improvement compared with the upgrade speed of Android 7.0 last year, and there may also be a breakthrough in the popularity of old models, after all, it was only a priority to upgrade and release that year's flagship phones.

Do you like Project Treble?

­(the picture comes from the network)

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