According to a report which comes from Greece, future Nubia-branded smartphones will ship with stock Android. The company did not mention anything to us while we were at MWC 2018, but if the source is to be believed, this China-based company is switching to stock Android, but not entirely. Nubia’s handsets in China will still ship with the company’s Nubia UI skin, and they will ship without Google Services, but outside of China, stock Android will be installed, and devices will have full support for Project Treble.
Now, according to the source, Nubia said that it is doing this mainly because of updates, as that is something its consumers have been complaining about the most. By installing stock Android, Nubia will be able to update its smartphones a lot faster, and thus keep its consumers happy. Now, the source did not mention anything about Android One or Android Go in the report, but Nubia will have to embrace Android One if they intend on using stock Android on its devices, it makes all the sense in the world. Android One, for those of you who do not know, is a project Google kicked off a while back, which allows companies to install stock Android on their devices, and basically receive updates straight from Google, which only need to be adapted for particular devices. This project was created to offer smartphone manufacturers a way to update their devices extremely fast, and avoid any issues that may appear by messing with an Android skin.
At MWC 2018 we’ve seen quite a few Android One and budget Android Go smartphones. HMD introduced three Nokia-branded smartphones which ship with stock Android and are a part of the Android One project, while General Mobile joined HMD by releasing the General Mobile GM8 Android One handset. Now, if there’s any truth in this report, which arrived from Greece, Nubia will probably make an official announcement in the near future. This does come as a surprise, kind of, as Nubia was quite persistent on including Nubia UI in its smartphones. HMD did announce that Nokia’s future smartphones will ship with stock Android and will be a part of Google’s Android One project (aside from feature and Android Go phones), so Nubia may as well, we’ll see.