More than three years ago, Google announced Project Treble, a large-scale rearchitect of Android designed to speed up software updates. Although the architecture introduced by Project Treble has helped OEMs speed up the delivery of major Android OS updates and monthly security fixes, it has had an adverse effect on SoC vendors such as Qualcomm. In fact, Treble actually increased the complexity and thus the engineering costs associated with providing Android OS update support for each chipset. This has limited the duration of support that Qualcomm can provide for its SoCs, but that will soon change. All SnaCdragon SoCs running Android 11 or later – starting with Snapdragon 888, Qualcomm will support 4 updates of the Android OS version, as well as 4 years of security updates. This is an additional year than previously provided for their flagship 800 series chipsets.
Since virtually all popular Android devices use Qualcomm chipsets, this is a great benefit for Android users.