Nokia Android smartphones will not get Project Treble, confirms HMD

HMD Global has confirmed that the existing Nokia Android smartphones will get the Android Oreo update soon. While the users await the rollout of the update, the company has confirmed that Google's Project Treble will not be supported by any of the available Nokia phones and this includes the entry-level Nokia 2 and the flagship Nokia 8.

Google announced Project Treble back in May at the Google I/O 2017 conference. It will enable faster Android updates by minimizing the hassles faced by the device manufacturers. The Project Treble is available on Android Oreo as an architectural change.

With the increasing number of queries regarding the rollout of Project Treble, an HMD moderator took to Nokia's community forums to state that the latest development will not make its way to the Android smartphones those were launched with Android Nougat. The moderator wrote, "HMD is fully committed to implementing Project Treble on all new Android Oreo products in the near future, and we apologise for any disappointment this may cause."

Also, clarifying on this, Juho Sarvikas, the Chief Product Officer at HMD tweeted that the company has not provided a separate vendor partition in the internal storage space and this is needed to enable Project Treble on the devices that run Android Oreo. Sarvikas also mentioned that the absence of the Treble support will leave no impact on the end users and assured that they are committed to rolling out future updates.

Notably, HMD rolled out the Android 8.0 Oreo update for the Nokia 8 units across the world sometime in November. This adheres to the company's commitment to rolling out the latest iteration of the mobile OS by the end of this year. Eventually, the Nokia 6, Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 smartphones are all set to get the Android Oreo update soon. We even came across a report that the company plans to skip the Android 7.1.2 Nougat to Nokia 3 and update it directly to Android Oreo.

For those concerned on the lack of support for Project Treble on Nokia smartphones, HMD is not the only vendor to not bring this feature to its existing devices. Even OnePlus announced that the existing devices including OnePlus 5T and its predecessors will not receive Project Treble.