Despite his departure from the smartphone business last yearLG distributes security patches and Android 12 updates for some of its devices.
The company released a timetable Outlined software updates scheduled for the second quarter of this year. Q52, Velvet, and Wing get the latest security patches, while Q92 5G, V50 ThinQ, and V50S ThinQ get an Android 12 update. The updates are scheduled for a Q2 release.
LG notes in the post that this is a preliminary roadmap “prepared prior to a detailed technical review,” and if an update doesn’t meet the company’s usability standards, it may not be released. The post also warns that some updates may not appear outside of Korea.
The roadmap tracks the company’s three-year promise that this will be the case announced shortly after announcing the demise of its smartphone business. It states that “premium phones released in 2019 and later (G Series, V Series, Velvet, Wing)” will receive three iterations of Android updates (which we assume are major updates acts). It’s unclear whether the company plans to update phones to Android 13 or not.
We’ve contacted LG regarding the expected longevity of these updates since the company no longer makes smartphones, and we’ll update this post if we get anything back.
The LG smartphone venture lasted quite a while before stalling in recent years. The company repeatedly pushed the limits with releases like this LG G2 and V10 which received rave reviews in their respective heydays.
Unfortunately, with phones like that, it flew too close to the sun G5 (which we liked)and his later attempts to change the game were met Consistently mediocre reception. While many reviewers praised the new things the company was trying, they just weren’t good enough to really take off. the wing for example was great in theory but had its fair share of problems like finding a target market.
Analysis: Hats off to LG
It’s encouraging to see that while LG has finished making new phones, it has yet to end software support for some existing phone customers.
Although LG included the Wing in its three-year promise, it’s not on the current roadmap, due to be released in Q2, meaning some additional tweaks will likely need to be made for the phone’s unique form factor.
However, the Stylo series and the K series of smartphones appear to be finished, as the three-year promise stated that these phones would only receive two major updates from their 2020 release year.
We think LG is pretty good at delivering on its promise, but it remains to be seen how the roadmap will actually pan out.
