Re:Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smart...
by phh on Sunday June 25, 2023 @05:35PM
(#36472830)
> To Google's credit they have already done a _lot_ of positive work in that area as I understand it
They haven't. I've extensively worked on their Project Treble, and they did a beautiful work to perfectly versionize every behavior OEM might depend on, or version driver APIs. They could use that to provide long term support (which is what I do in my own project, the foundation is very sound), but in practice they use it as a way to obsolete code faster:
Before Project Treble, Android kept whatever code was in use. So if some OEM was still using a 5 year old code path, and it was still working fine it would remain.
After Project Treble, every driver API has a new version every year, and the older ones will be deprecated (read: purposely broken or completely removed) within 3 years.
Before project treble, OEMs could maintain the Android for their platform quite effortlessly for 5 years, nowadays they have to rewrite whole parts of drivers after 3 years.
someone will come and say that since Project Treble OEMs have been upgrading for longer. But I consider it's completely a matter of timing, the smartphone market stagnating. Look at nVidia Shield and fairphones for reference.
They haven't. I've extensively worked on their Project Treble, and they did a beautiful work to perfectly versionize every behavior OEM might depend on, or version driver APIs. They could use that to provide long term support (which is what I do in my own project, the foundation is very sound), but in practice they use it as a way to obsolete code faster:
Before Project Treble, Android kept whatever code was in use. So if some OEM was still using a 5 year old code path, and it was still working fine it would remain.
After Project Treble, every driver API has a new version every year, and the older ones will be deprecated (read: purposely broken or completely removed) within 3 years.
Before project treble, OEMs could maintain the Android for their platform quite effortlessly for 5 years, nowadays they have to rewrite whole parts of drivers after 3 years.
someone will come and say that since Project Treble OEMs have been upgrading for longer. But I consider it's completely a matter of timing, the smartphone market stagnating. Look at nVidia Shield and fairphones for reference.