According to SamMobile, Google announced Project Mainline for Android in 2019, a program designed to separate key Android components from the OS itself. This approach will allow Google to provide updates to modules directly through the Play Store. This means that if Google rolls out an update for a key OS component, users won’t have to wait for their phone manufacturer to include it in the next OTA system update; they can get the update directly from the Google Play Store.
So far, Google has decoupled many key components from Android, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and UWB, and now Google is taking the same approach with NFC. Mishaal Rahman discovered the source code for AOSP (Android Open Source Project), which shows that Google is making the NFC stack a Mainline module (separate from the OS), which will allow Google to provide updates through the Google Play Store to quickly fix any issues with the NFC component.
According to Mishaal, the latest changes may not be included in the final version of Android 14. The method to make the NFC stack a Mainline module has just appeared in AOSP, which means we’ll see it in Android 15 at the earliest.
