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Essential discusses Project Treble, bug squashing, aptX support, and more in Reddit AMA
June 16, 2025
With Andy Rubinback at the helmand the company sticking to its promise of timely updates,Essentiallooks to start 2018 on a high note, with the company’s recent Reddit AMA giving us a bit of insight into how it plans to kick off the new year.
First up isProject Treble,Google‘s software initiative that will supposedly lead to fasterAndroidupdates. Essential already confirmed it will implement support for Project Treble in theEssential Phone‘sAndroid 8.1 Oreorelease, though the company gave us a bit of insight into the update process itself.
Essential also addressed applications that have not taken advantage of the added screen real estate and said it reached out to developers to try and improve this. In the meantime, Essential is working on a “switch” within Settings that forces apps to run in full-screen mode, though the company urges people to reach out to developers so they can update their apps.
Meanwhile, Essential said it made “modem changes” in the upcoming Android 8.1 release that will hopefully address cell reception issues that some Essential Phone owners have had. The company concedes that the effectiveness of these changes will depend on how severe your cell reception issues are, though “modem stability should definitely improve.”
While we are on the topic of bug fixes, Essential apologized for taking its time with touch latency and scrolling fixes, saying that “there are trade-offs we are testing internally.” The goal, said Essential, is to provide some kind of optimization in the Android 8.1 release.
Essential also confirmed that whatever comes after thethird Oreo betafor the Essential Phone will include support for Qualcomm’saptXaudio codec, which promises to improve Bluetooth sound quality. The third Oreo beta also includes Google’s January security patch and fixes forSpectre and Meltdown, with Essential still finalizing logistics for the stable Oreo release.
Finally, Essential has moved away from bi-weekly to monthly AMAs, with the company holding one on the third Wednesday of each month.
You can read thefull Reddit AMA here.
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