At a technical level, APEX has been compared to Magisk, which works by mounting folders into the system partition at boot, rather than modifying the system partition directly (which is detectable). APEX appears to extend that same functionality over into core Android packages, separating out things like the Android Runtime into their own packages, separate from the system partition. That means they can be individually and separately updated from the system image.
It’s possible that modularized OEM modifications could then be distributed on top of a Google-maintained system image – basically meaning the version of Android itself on a given phone could potentially be updated by Google, but the bits responsible for an OEM skin could be present, updated, and maintained as separate components. That’s not to mention how it could ease ROM development, as Treble has.
It’s good to see Google working to go beyond Treble, because the cold and harsh facts are that Treble hasn’t made any serious dent in the update problem at all. The problem is as big as it’s ever been.
Treble only applies to the past ~year of phones produced. These improvements will only gather speed as people buy phones new enough to use them.
Treble was meant to solve the highly embarrassing problem of Google Pixel phones receiving a paltry 2 years of upgrades by providing a workaround to Qualcomm’s driver support policy. Essentially it defines an API version for the HAL, so as long as Google sticks to a certain version they can push upgrades to the Pixel 3 even if Qualcomm doesn’t release new drivers.
It still leaves the distribution of the upgrade (and update) to the manufacturer, so it wasn’t meant to force OEMs to do anything. And since most of the OEM’s work is skinning work (the driver comes from the SoC vendor), it wasn’t as much help to OEMs as claimed.
And yes, people like the stuff those skins add more than upgrades.
Edited 2018-11-10 13:26 UTC
Security updates are really enough for Android anyway, since Android doesn’t need a full version upgrade to run the latest apps like iOS does. This just isn’t a problem in Android.
It also prevents the device from getting slower with each major update as my iPhones always did, and prevents the UI from changing which does frustrate many end users. There are benefits to the current model.
Edited 2018-11-10 16:07 UTC
Fair points.
Treble was designed to make android easier to upgrade by the manufacturers, because they said it was too costly and difficult for them to keep providing support. But as someone who maintains a distro on my own, I don’t think the argument ever held water, it was just an excuse for their desire not to provide updates. What google delivered did not fix the update problem because it did not take manufacturers out of the update chain. I criticized google (and linux itself for that matter) for not doing more to isolate the proprietary manufacturer bits that hold back new kernels.
This is the first time I hear of APEX, and I don’t know the details, but I hope they’ve finally addressed it because being dependent upon hardware manufacturers who have a strong incentive not to provide long term support is one of the more regretful outcomes of putting hardware manufacturers in charge of operating systems.
As consumers, we are so lucky that PC manufacturers didn’t have this level of control over us; I can do as I please without much interference from the manufacturer: update my OS, install a different open source OS, write my own OS, add/update/fix peripherals. Just think how awful PCs would have been if the software and hardware were packaged as a fixed bundle that we couldn’t replace or take apart.
Ironically IBM hadn’t intended for it’s PCs to be open, they would have preferred to have full control. Even more ironically in hindsight is that the company with the 1984 ad rebelling against corporate control would play such a pivotal role in creating the most restrictive devices and walled gardens we see today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
Wow, that took a turn…seriously though I hope APEX opens a genuine path to more independence and isn’t merely a path to more google empowerment.
Edited 2018-11-10 15:10 UTC
Just curious – which distro do you maintain?
Pro-Competition,
GMLinux2. It’s a server os that I use for my company infrastructure/development/clients. It has some patches and addresses some of my biggest gripes with other distros: too bloated, complicated, and fragile. In particular the base OS is designed to be robust and stateless in that you can delete the whole root file system, reboot and still be able to connect in.
I suppose I could try to promote it publically, but it would need more work especially with package management. I’d be willing to do it but I have doubts that enough people would even use it to make it worthwhile. I’d need some major press coverage if I wanted it to be more than a footnote on the huge wall of linux distros (picture me around 2010 on that debian branch):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distributi…
Hey Thom, does OSNews want to endorse an indy linux distro? Haha
I think there’s another osnews member working on their own distro, but it only came up in passing so I don’t remember who it was.
Edited 2018-11-10 23:44 UTC
What does “GM” stand for, and was there “GMLinux1”?
It’s the initials for my company, which I’d rather keep out of google’s prying eyes, haha.
There was no “GMLinux1”, it was just GMLinux
I built the distro from the ground up and went GoboLinux with it to re-make linux the way I thought it should be.
Regretfully, this was way too much work because tons of packages have hard coded linux conventions in them, the conventions that I didn’t want. If I had Mark Shuttleworth’s money, then I wouldn’t have turned back, but alas it was just too much work given my resources, so pragmatically I had to scale back in GMLinux2.
It was only later that I learned of GoboLinux:
https://gobolinux.org/
Try Patreon. Wouldn’t hurt.
kwan_e,
I’ve thought about crowd funding, but I think it’d be hard to make a living that way. Does anyone here do it? I’m guessing that for most people it’s more about supplemental income.
Wha, you don’t want your distro to be associated by Google with your company / searchable?
…don’t you want to steal some spotlight from General Motors? 
zima,
It’s merely to separate personal from business.
It’s so funny that you should mention them though, my last business trip was to their corporate offices, they bought one of my projects from another company I worked for. I didn’t sell them GMLinux though!
Edited 2018-11-14 01:54 UTC
They did until Digital did reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS.
In all fairness, it was mostly Microsoft not letting OEMs mangle the Windows shell and the Windows kernel. It’s these two terms in the MS EULA what allows you the laptop owner to install a vanilla Windows DVD on your laptop, an unlocked bootloader is not enough. Oh, and Microsoft taking care of driver backwards compatibility, so you can load a Vista driver on 8.1
Edited 2018-11-12 18:20 UTC