Samsung is an industry leader when it comes to Android OS and security updates. There are only a few Android manufacturers that can match the four years of Android OS and five years of security updates that it provides. Never one to rest on its laurels, the company is now actively considering to expand the support for security updates beyond five years, which is currently in line with industry standards.
This is particularly noteworthy in light of the announcement from Google this week. It announced that Google’s latest Pixel phones, and subsequent devices, will now receive seven years of Android OS and security updates.
Samsung may provide over five years of security updates in the future
We brought up the subject during our interview with Shin-Chul Baik, the Principal Engineer and Technical Program Manager of the Security Team for Samsung’s Mobile eXperience division, at the Samsung Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco.
He revealed that Samsung has been actively discussing what the company should be doing with regards to long term security updates beyond the five years of support that it currently provides. He mentioned that this vision of supporting devices for longer aligns with Samsung as well and that in light of new regulations coming up, Samsung is preparing to go beyond its current period of five years of support.
It’s important to understand the scale at which Samsung currently delivers software security updates. More than 1 billion devices are updated every month and over 10 billion annually. Over 150+ devices receive security updates on its monthly, quarterly, and bi-annual release schedules in markets across the world. Baik mentioned that Samsung has invested an incredible amount of resources in making this happen.
Samsung has been integral at prioritizing monthly security updates for the entire Android ecosystem. It’s the pioneer of the security maintenance releases as it worked with Google to set this up and ramped it exponentially from there. It also merits mention that the pace at which Samsung sends out new security updates now is highly impressive. All credit to the security team who are doing an outstanding and industry-leading job.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that there will potentially be support for more than four Android OS and One UI updates from Samsung. That wasn’t a relevant topic during this discussion but from a security standpoint, the idea to provide enhanced security support is certainly on the table at Samsung.
