When you buy a Samsung Android, you used to be able to get around two major Android updates out of them—two years, basically. After that, Samsung could not guarantee that future dessert-themed Android updates (now boring numbers) would arrive one your phone, meaning that you’d have to root your device and find an alternative OS if you wanted new features and updates after that.
At Samsung’s Unpacked event last week, the company announced that it is now going to give its phones a whopping three years of major Android updates. While we doubt this is an “exactly 1,095 days since the phone’s launch” kind of thing and maybe more a “three generations of Android updates” kind of a thing, who knows how this process might pan out in these everything-is-delayed quarantine times.
Are there caveats to this policy? You bet. First, Samsung used the phrase “up to three generations” when describing said policy. As Android Police notes, this likely means that cheap Samsung Androids aren’t going to get the full three, whereas its super-expensive flagship phones are almost guaranteed to benefit from the change.
Also, the policy retroactively applies to Samsung phones as far back as the Galaxy S10 and Note 10. These launched with Android 9 Pie, so odds are good they’ll be supported with major updates all the way through Android 12. The recent Galaxy S20 and just-announced Note 20, which launched with Android 10, should able to go all the way to Android 13 without issue.
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The full list of devices that should work with the new three-year policy is:
- Samsung Galaxy S10
- Samsung Galaxy S10+
- Samsung Galaxy S10e
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
- Samsung Galaxy S20
- Samsung Galaxy S20+
- Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra
- Samsung Galaxy Note 20
- Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra
In total, this means that a flagship Samsung phone should be able to get three new iterations of Android from whenever it launched, as well as monthly security patches for that timeframe—switching to quarterly for the fourth year, if its standard security setup is simply bumped out a year due to this new policy. Not bad!
