Project Treble Failed — Google Now Polices the Symptom

Google is now doing what it said it fixed seven years ago. Means it either failed or never understood what it was fixing. The company yesterday announced that it will start delisting Android apps from the Play Store that exceed new memory-usage limits — a direct attempt to solve what it calls a RAM crisis. But this is not a new crisis. It is the same crisis Google addressed in 2017 with Project Treble, a technical restructuring meant to let manufacturers update the Android OS layer without waiting for hardware vendors, theoretically decoupling the software bloat from device constraints.

Nine years later, we are back here. Google is policing symptoms instead of treating causes. That tells you something about whether Treble actually solved what it promised. When a system designer tries the same fix twice, the second attempt usually means the first one didn't work — and nobody wants to admit it.

Google has practiced this move before. Doze in Android 6 was supposed to manage battery drain by restricting background processes. Android 12 introduced stricter heap limits. Each time the company announced it was solving bloat at the platform level. Each time developers adapted by working around the constraints. Each time the bloat problem remained because the real issue was never the apps. It was the multiplication of devices with wildly different RAM, chipsets, and OS versions, all running different vendor customizations. That fragmentation is what Treble was built to eliminate. That fragmentation is why Google is now resorting to enforcement.

What matters is whether this policy will actually improve the experience for Android users, or whether it will simply shift the burden to smaller developers who cannot afford to optimize for 200 different device configurations. Google's own apps, Gmail, Maps, YouTube. Are notoriously memory-heavy, and there is no indication they will face the same restrictions. The company is essentially telling developers to solve a problem it created by failing to create a unified platform, then punishing them for not solving it. This is not regulation. This is a company unable to fix its architecture pretending it is enforcing a standard.

Google is now doing what it said it fixed seven years ago, which means it either failed or never understood what it was fixing.

For anyone building systems meant to work at scale, this is the lesson: when you avoid fixing the root problem and instead add enforcement layers, you reveal that you do not actually understand what broke. Google knows how to build platforms. What it is showing here is that it does not know how to maintain one.