Almost four years after it was launched, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is still receiving security patches
Samsung released the Galaxy S6 way back in March 2015. In Android years, the device may as well be ancient, as most devices have software update lifespans of two years at most, with some unscrupulous OEMs—LG comes to mind—offering just one, and only when they deem it fit. The S6 is looking to be a huge anomaly, though, as it just received the November security update this week, almost four years after it was released.
Samsung has a concrete update timeline for its flagship devices. The phones receive two major updates, and an extra year of just security updates, making for three years of support in total. The S6 was released in March 2015, so logic dictates that the phone should have gotten its last security patch back in March this year. Apparently not.
According to the source, the S6 is receiving the November update in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Users in certain countries also got the October update last month, showing that this isn’t just a fluke. Of course, the S6 is still on Nougat. It ran on Lollipop out of the box and received two major updates, as promised.
While this is far from the norm in the Android ecosystem, it makes sense when one takes note of certain factors. Most important is the fact that the S6 shipped exclusively with Samsung’s in-house Exynos 7420 SoC. While Snapdragon-powered phones have to depend on Qualcomm’s good graces for driver updates and the likes, the S6 holds its metaphorical destiny in its own hands. That said, its still impressive that Samsung has chosen to support the device for this long, especially considering the fact that Huawei, a similarly-positioned OEM that also uses its own in-house SoCs, hasn’t done anything of the sort.