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This week, at its Made by Google event, the search giant announced the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. It also announced that these two phones would get updates for the next seven years. That’s Android OS updates, feature drops, security updates and AI innovations until October 2030. Which is pretty crazy, and that forced Google to dig deeper into how they provide updates to Pixel users.
Google said in their blog post about this move to seven years of updates, that they will no longer be pushing out updates on a specific day each month.
“We also dug into how we can deliver the highest quality, best tested updates to Pixel users on a consistent basis. As part of this effort, our security updates, bug fixes and feature updates won’t roll out on a specific day each month. Instead, we’ll deploy updates as soon as they’ve completed the necessary tests to ensure they improve the experience for all Pixel customers.”
Basically, instead of the first Monday of the month, announcing the new security update, it will instead be announced and start rolling out when it’s ready. That could be sooner or it could be later. This is a good thing for Google. Especially after how delayed some early updates were for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7. It also means that Samsung may no longer be ahead of Google in pushing out updates.
7 years of updates is ludicrous
Google promising 7 years of updates for the new Pixel 8 series is pretty insane. So much so, that internally here at AndroidHeadlines it’s still hard to believe that this is really going to happen. Knowing how Google likes to ditch projects, they’ve never really stuck with anything for that long.
This is good to see, however. Previously, Apple was the king of updates (and Samsung on the Android side). Apple doesn’t promise updates for a certain number of years, instead they just keep updating their older phones. Since the iPhone 6s, most iPhones were getting six years of iOS updates. Samsung on the other hand, was doing four years of OS updates and five years of security updates. Now Google is almost doubling that, with seven years.
Now that doesn’t mean that the software is going to run as smoothly in 2030, as it does today, in 2023. But your phone will still be updated, and all security exploits patched. That’s excellent news.