Google’s Android P update on the Essential Phone means there’s no more excuses for late updates

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business
Insider

• The Essential Phone is the only Android phone in recent
  memory that has received Google’s latest version of Android at
  the same time as Google’s own Pixel devices. 
• It shows that there’s no longer any excuse for Android
  phones getting Android updates several months after they’re
  released. 

---

Usually, third-party phones that aren’t made by Google don’t get
Android updates for months after they’re released.

Sometimes it’s years, if they ever get the update at all. 

But Essential, the company behind the gorgeous $400 Essential
Phone with high-end specs and design, was able to
deliver the latest version of Android at exactly the same time as
Google did for its Pixel phones. No other Android phone that
hasn’t been made by Google can boast the same thing, if my memory
serves me correctly. 

How? “Once Google handed off their latest P beta release to us,
we sprinted to merge this code into ours and handed it off to
QA/Beta testers to ensure the build is
consumer-ready,” Essential program manager Ron Cheung said
in a blog
post. 

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business
Insider

“A lot of work ahead of time!” Essential software lead
Jean-Baptiste Théou said. “A lot of planning and
dedication to make it happen.”

Essential quality assurance manager Elyse Kirker said
“There isn’t a lot of back and forth between multiple teams to
bring this all together… and we have incredibly quick
turnaround with building and testing our patches as a result — no
red tape to worry about here.”

According to Théou, Google’s “Treble” feature that Google
said would make it easier for phone makers to push Android
updates more quickly is actually working. “Google made a
significant effort in Oreo, and finished it in P, to separate
Google code from Vendor code (Treble). This is an amazing change
for OEM’s, because it offered us more flexibility, and allowed us
to release updates to our users much more quickly,” Jean-Baptiste
said. 

Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

To be fair, Android updates can take a little longer for other
Android phone makers, especially when they include extra layers
of features and interface design — often called
“skins” — on their phones. Indeed, phone makers have to
integrate the latest version of Android with their own “skins,”
which takes time and resources. And some of these extra features
from phone-maker skins can actually be pretty great. As for
the Essential Phone, it doesn’t run an extra skin. Or if it does,
it’s extremely light and hardly noticeable. That way, it’s easier
and faster for Essential to integrate the latest version of
Android to its phone. 

For phones that are sold through carriers like Verizon,
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, where most Americans buy their
smartphones, Android updates are even more delayed due to extra
vetting processes by the carriers.

But I’m relunctant to make too many excuses for those
Android phone makers that use skins or those that are sold
through carriers. At the end of the day, late updates are a
contributing factor to one of Android’s biggest issues: a

fragmented ecosystem, where millions of Android phones are
running on several different versions of Android, causing
security issues, headaches for app developers. More importantly,
users miss out on the latest software developed by Google —
only the most prolific software company in the
world. 

Antonio Villas-Boas/Business
Insider

Let’s take Samsung’s latest Galaxy S9 smartphone from
February 2018, for example. It’s still running on Android 8.0
“Oreo,” which originally rolled out in August 2017. Now that
Android 9 “Pie” is out, it means the Galaxy S9 is two updates
behind Google’s Pixel and the Essential phone as of August
2018. 

The Galaxy S9 hasn’t yet receive the Android 8.1 update
that originally rolled out in December 2017. Samsung
had months before the Galaxy S9 was even released to give it
Android 8.1. But it’s now seven months later, and Android 8.1
still isn’t on the Galaxy S9. I’d be pretty surprised if
Samsung’s smartphone budget is smaller than Essential’s.

Other third-party Android phone makers aren’t especially
better about rolling out Android updates, either. 

If Essential, a small smartphone company that’s only released a
single phone to date, can get Android updates on day one, so can
the big guys like Samsung, LG, and pretty much any other
non-Google Android phone maker out there — at least for those
companies’ flagship devices. There’s no longer any excuse for
late Android updates for premium phones. 

Google also actively announced which phone companies are rolling
out the Android P update in the fall. The list includes “Sony
Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Essential, as
well as all qualifying Android One devices, will receive this
update by the end of this fall.”

While it may seem like “this fall” is late for receiving Android
P, it’s actually not so bad. As it stands now, Android P only
contains
some of the new features that Google announced during its
Google I/O event earlier this year. The rest of the features will
be rolled out in the fall.