AOSP Oreo boots on the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro thanks to Project Treble

Project Treble is an interesting development from Google. Instead of keeping the Hardware Abstraction Layers (HALs) in the regular Android partition, they’re kept in a separate partition and standardized. This was done for easier updating, but it also has great implication on the phone flashing community.

This means that, theoretically, a stock Android Oreo AOSP system image can boot on a device that supports Treble even if it didn’t come with stock Android from the factory. And this is exactly the case with both the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro.

Users have managed to successfully boot unmodified AOSP ROMs on the two devices. While they are not in full working order, all the hardware works. This is a huge deal, as historically devices with skins needed a lot of work for AOSP to even boot, and when it did, things like radios and the camera wouldn’t work until developers fixed them manually.

This doesn’t mean that owners of the two devices can go install an AOSP ROM right now. But it bodes well for future ROM development for the devices and really showcases how beneficial Project Treble is for both developers and manufacturers. Now I’ll just patiently wait for LineageOS to come to the Mate 10 Pro.

source: androidandme