With the launch of Android 8.0 last year, Google released Project Treble into the world. Treble was one of Android's biggest engineering projects ever, modularizing the Android operating system away from the hardware and greatly reducing the amount of work needed to update a device. The goal here is nothing short of fixing Android's continual fragmentation problem, and now, six months later, it seems like the plan is actually working.

At Google I/O this year, you could see signs of the Treble revolution all over the show. The Android P beta launched, but it wasn't just on Google's own Pixel devices—for the first time ever, an Android Developer Preview launched simultaneously on devices from Google, Nokia, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Essential, Vivo, Sony, and Oppo, all thanks to Project Treble compatibility. Even car makers—some of the slowest adopters of technology on Earth—were on the Project Treble train. Dodge and Volvo both had prototype cars running Android as the infotainment system, and both were running Android P.

As is becoming custom for our annual trip to Google I/O, we were able to sit down with some core members of the Android Team: Iliyan Malchev, the head of Project Treble, and Dave Burke, Android's VP of engineering. (We quoted Iliyan Malchev a million times during the Android 8.0 review, so it was nice to get information from him first hand, and Dave Burke has been through the Ars interview gauntlet several times now.) And through this lengthy chat, we got a better understanding of what life is like now that Project Treble is seeing some uptake from OEMs.

What follows is a transcript with some of the interview lightly edited for clarity. For a fuller perspective, we've also included some topical background comments in italics.
Proving out Project Treble with Android P

First up, a recap of what's going on with Treble right now.

Iliyan Malchev: With Treble, the operating system has separated to the adaptation layers that tailor down to the hardware. And that's still the case, but the devil is in the details. There's a ton of nuance that we still need to get right, and this is what we've focused on with this [Android P] release. What is the case today—and I think that gets overlooked by a lot of the press on Treble—is that any device that is preloaded with Google's apps, any device that launches with Oreo or subsequent releases, must work smoothly with a binary image of Android that we built for certification purposes.

This image isn't a product. The intent is not to launch this, but the idea is, by requiring that this "golden image" run on everything out there, we cresate a centripetal force that pushes our partners ever so gently toward not changing Android in ways that aren't really meaningful to their bottom lines. We finished that technical work with Android P this year, and we started working with silicon manufacturers.

Dave Burke: Yeah, I think this is actually one of the biggest shifts. After finishing the technical work, there was the actual process of engagement of working with the silicon vendors, which is a big change.