Following the launch of its latest phone – the OnePlus 5T – OnePlus held an AMA on its official forums to answer any questions that its fans/customers had about the new tech. A lot of questions were answered, and one of the more interesting tidbits to come out of this was the fact that none of OnePlus's phones will support Project Treble.
Quick refresher – what in the world is Project Treble?
This is a system that Google announced in May to help speed up the infamously slow update process for new versions of Android when they're released, and although phones that ship with Android 8.0 Oreo or later have Treble turned on by default, ones that later upgrade to Oreo from previous versions of Android aren't required to do so.
As a result of this, the OnePlus 3, 3T, 5, and even the 5T won't support Treble. This could theoretically mean slower updates compared to other manufacturers, but we wouldn't get too worried just yet.
The lack of Treble on the 5T is far from a dealbreaker.
First of all, we still haven't seen any real benefit from Treble. This will hopefully change beginning next year as phones actually start shipping with Oreo out of the box, but there's still no guarantee that we'll see a noticeable difference in update turnaround times.
Secondly, OnePlus is already damn good at updating its hardware to new versions of Android in a timely manner. An open beta of Oreo will be released to the 5 and 5T in late December, and last year's 3 and 3T recently received an update to a stable build of it.
Is it peculiar and potentially irritating that OnePlus won't be supporting Treble on its phones? Yes. Is it reason enough to not buy the 5T? Not at all.
