I knew Project Treble was exciting, but this is really interesting:<p>>Treble promises to change everything. Malchev says that Treble standardizes Android hardware support to such a degree that generic Android builds compiled from AOSP can boot and run on every Treble device. In fact, these "raw AOSP" builds are what will be used for some of the CTS testing Google requires all Android OEMs to pass in order to license the Google apps—it's not just that they <i>should</i> work, they are <i>required</i> to work.<p>Ron paints a rosy future here:<p>>Custom ROMs shouldn't need to be painstakingly hand-crafted for individual devices anymore—a single build should be able to cover multiple Treble devices from multiple manufacturers. Imagine the next time a major new version of Android is released—on Day One of the AOSP code drop, a single build (or a small handful of builds) could cover every Treble device with an unlocked bootloader, with a "download Android 9.0 here" link on XDA or some other technical website.<p>If this comes to fruition, the ROM community is going to go nuts. This is enormously exciting and Oreo will turn out to be a real turning point for Android.<p>One thing that is interesting though is the implication that Android updates will get more iOS-y in the future. By that I mean certain features will be missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it.