TWRP lead explains why it’ll take time for the custom recovery to support Android 10

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Dessert name or not, Android 10 is the flavor of the season. Several flagships from prominent OEMs have received their official updates, while several others have received a taste of the new OS version thanks to Android 10 custom ROMs. Google is also very happy with Android 10’s adoption rate, made possible because of Project Treble and the whole host of other changes made over the years. Unfortunately, while Android 10 brings with itself its own joys, it also makes a few things difficult for custom recoveries like TWRP. TWRP lead developer and XDA Senior Recognized Developer Dees_Troy has highlighted some of the issues that the recovery faces on its way to officially support Android 10.

As Dees_Troy puts it bluntly, TWRP support for Android 10 is going to take a while. His statements are made in relation to the Google Pixel 3 and Google Pixel 4, as well as for devices that will ship with Android 10 as their base version. Older non-Pixel devices that shipped with older versions of Android and have subsequently been updated to Android 10 are not affected.

According to the dev, Android 10 brought about some of the biggest changes to AOSP’s recovery implementation in recent years. Components in the AOSP recovery have been moved into subfolders, which makes merging changes into TWRP more time consuming. Changes made to the ramdisk, such as moving away from static binaries with no linked libraries to dynamic linking, have also presented the devs with decisions to make on how best to move forward in light of those changes. Even when those decisions have been made, new challenges come up, such as mounting the system partition to /system in light of this dynamic linking. Android 10 also introduces what the dev is calling a “super” partition — a partition that contains a bunch of smaller partitions; and Google is utilizing a read-only ext4 file system for the new dynamic partitions within the super partition. This then presents the developers with new challenges to tackle, such as how users will install GApps, and how to provide users with the right tools to manage and make changes to the dynamic partitions on the super partition.

All of these changes and the accompanying reactions require a fair few modifications to be made, alongside discussions on how best to approach the situation. The end result is that official TWRP will take some time to achieve full Android 10 support.

Source: TWRP