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Today is the day that some Nexus owners will see the over the air update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The Nexus 5, Nexus 6, 2013 Nexus 7 (both the LTE and WiFi-only models), Nexus 9 and Nexus Player should start to receive the new version of Android from today, subject to Google discovering any issues with the download. We have also seen device manufacturers make their own announcements regarding releasing Android 6.0 Marshmallow for their devices; for example, LG has stated that both the 2014 flagship device (the LG G3) and 2015 flagship Android smartphone (the LG G4) will be updated to Android 6.0 Marshmallow reasonably quickly. However, today we’ve seen what appears to be the 2013 flagship LG Android smartphone, the LG G2, going through the Geekbench benchmarking process running none other than Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Lone reports such as this one should always be treated with at least an element of suspicion, as it is rather unusual that somebody testing the G2 running Android 6.0 would run the Geekbench application on the device and let the results filter up into the website. However, the story is plausible in some ways. The G2 certainly has the hardware to run Android 6.0 Marshmallow. As a recap, it’s based around a 5.2-inch, 1080p IPS display panel, the 2.3 GHz, quad core, 32-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 system-on-chip backed up by 2 GB of RAM. There’s 32 GB of onboard storage, a 3,000 mAh battery and a 13MP rear camera. In many respects, the G2 has similar hardware to the LG Nexus 5 (both devices are based around the same chipset and have a 1080p resolution screen, although the Nexus 5’s screen is slightly smaller than the LG G2). The device hardware is certainly up to running Android Marshmallow, then. How about LG as a business? The G2 is a two year old device and so if LG are going to update the software, we would expect newer devices to come first in the queue. We also need to consider that the G2 has been upgraded to Android 5.0 Lollipop, although if LG were to make the leap from Android 5.0 to 6.0 and skip 5.1, they would certainly not be alone in this move. LG may, of course, take the decision that the G2 is “too old” to be effectively updated to Android 6.0 and instead would prefer to update their newer models and encourage customers to upgrade.
It is also possible that somebody has built a working version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow for the LG G2, installed it and run the benchmark, or conversely this is a fake result uploaded to Geekbench – either through spoofing the hardware or simply editing the screen image.
