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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Not really, because OEMs are still free to do their own customizations and they are the ones responsible for pushing updates.

http://androidbackstage.blogspot.de/2017/08/episode-75-proje...

Guess how many will push updates, even with Treble enabled devices?

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More than before. Sure, some manufacturers will prefer to update only their flagships, but that won't be a problem for long. Treble doesn't force OEMs to update - it simply makes updating take less time and resources of the OEM. Now that its cheap, some OEMs have the capability to update their entire stable of devices, incentivizing the other OEMs to follow suit. Of course, it'll take some time for this to materialize, but in the meanwhile, installing ROMs becomes much easier.

For me that is just plain wishful thinking until Google actually forces OEMs to update, or adopts the Microsoft way and pushes the updates itself.

Otherwise this will be yet another failed attempt.

Hopefully somewhat more?

It's likely a logical first step in a larger push to resolve the update issue on Android devices.

right, but how many logical first steps down this road has Google taken in the past...? This seems like the fourth or fifth.

Approximately zero - I mean, about the only things they've done is updating of play service stuff and some interesting malware detection techniques. They've (sadly) done almost nothing towards the goal of truly improving the update situation until now.

> They've (sadly) done almost nothing towards the goal of truly improving the update situation until now.

That's not entirely true. They attempted previously to do this via policy (Android Update Alliance), but that failed because it's too expensive for OEMs to update, which is what Treble is attempting to fix. And in the meantime over the past several years Google had taken a policy of backporting security fixes, which many OEMs are on board with and do roll out security fixes.

They only push security fixes for flagship devices.

This brand new LG is stuck on June patch level.

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