Android 15 Upgrade Report Card: What the…?! – Computerworld

Samsung, too, has managed to gain a reputation in recent years for being a “leader” in Android update delivery. Much like with OnePlus, this perception is misguided.

The data tells you everything you need to know. Here are Samsung’s Android Upgrade Report Card results from the past seven Android release cycles:

• Android 15: 0% F
• Android 14: 81% B
• Android 13: 73% C
• Android 12: 68% D+
• Android 11: 68% D+
• Android 10: 68% D+
• Android 9: 37% F

The company’s certainly had some commendable (relative) high points, such as last year’s 81% result. But there’ve been an awful lot of ups and downs and some truly terrible lows in the mix, too. And a seven-year average of 56% is nothing to write home about.

Plus, much like OnePlus, Samsung tends to prioritize its most recent, current flagship while making anyone who owns a top-of-the-line phone from even a year ago wait significantly longer — anywhere from 60-some-odd days, on the better end of the spectrum, to well over 150 days on many recent cycles. (And that’s to say nothing about the company’s extremely poky progress with midrange and budget-level devices, which are treated very much as distant second-class citizens when it comes to upgrade deliveries.)

The company is also consistently quiet when it comes to any meaningful communication about its progress or when folks can expect to see something, anything, show up on their phones. In fact, the first official peep we’ve heard at all about a rollout date came this past Tuesday — March 4 — which was 183 days after Android 15’s release and after the six-month window of consideration for this specific analysis. (Long story short, Samsung now says it’ll start its first Android 15 rollouts sometime in April, which means best-case scenario, certain Galaxy phone owners may have the software seven months late and on the brink of Android 16’s arrival.)

All in all, it’s not a great look for anyone — but especially not for the company that most average phone buyers associate with Android and frequently turn to without even realizing other options are available.

Wait — what about everyone else?

Does this list seem shorter than you were expecting? Alas, this is our current Android hardware reality, at least here in the States at this moment.

One-time Android regular LG is no longer around, as the company bowed out of the phone-making game entirely in 2021. And early Android veteran HTC has been off the grid since 2021’s Report Card, given the fact that it’s barely even putting out new phones anymore — certainly not flagship-level devices. If the company ever comes back around and attempts to get in the game again at any point, I’ll eagerly add it back into the list for inclusion.

And then there’s Sony — a company a random reader will ask me about on occasion but that just doesn’t make sense to include in this list right now. Sony has never had much of a meaningful presence in the US smartphone market (which is a shame, really — but that’s another story for another time), and in recent years, its role in the US mobile market has dropped from “barely anything” to “virtually nothing.”

I can’t even begin to make head or tails of Sony’s convoluted, confusingly named phone lineup anymore, but the company sent out its first Android 15 upgrade in late November and has been chipping away at its list slowly but surely ever since. It certainly wouldn’t be topping the list if it were included in this analysis, but it’d be another addition to the middle-of-the-pack, C-range section if it had any meaningful US presence.

What about the HMD-owned Nokia? That company has a fairly limited presence in the US, but it had generally done a solid job of keeping its phones updated with both major and minor OS releases and with monthly security patches up until 2021, when Google’s Android One program started quietly falling apart. These days, HMD/Nokia’s taking its good sweet time to get current software onto its devices — with rollouts just getting going in late December — so even if it were included in this analysis, it wouldn’t be a remarkable result.

Last but not least, there’s Nothing — the hype-loving small-scale phone-maker from OnePlus founder Carl Pei. Nothing has been doing (ahem) virtually nothing in terms of communicating about its software support progress with its paying customers, but its earliest hint of an incoming Android 14 upgrade happened in mid-December, for its current-gen Nothing Phone 2 models, with its older-gen Nothing Phone 1 following in mid-January. Suffice it to say, its score wouldn’t be spectacular if it were significant enough to include in this breakdown.

In detail: How these grades were calculated

This Android Upgrade Report Card follows the same grading system used with last year’s analysis — which features precise and clearly defined standards designed to weigh performance for both current and previous-generation flagship phones along with a company’s communication efforts, all in a consistent and completely objective manner.

Each manufacturer’s overall grade is based on the following formula, with final scores being rounded up or down to the nearest full integer:

• 50% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagship phone(s)
• 25% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach most immediate previous-gen flagship phone(s)
• 15% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back previous-gen flagship phone(s)
• 10% of grade: Overall communication with customers throughout the upgrade process

Notably, 2023’s Android 13 analysis marked the first time the formula was expanded to account for flagship phones that are two generations back in addition to the most recent previous-gen models. With the de facto standard support window stretching to a minimum of three years, it made sense to take a broader view and see how different device-makers are actually doing when it comes to supporting those older models — as a promise of support alone only means so much. How long it actually takes for those phones to receive updates is equally important. And the scores here now reflect that, extending further into a phone’s lifespan.

Upgrade timing often varies wildly from one country or carrier to the next, so in order to create a consistent standard for scoring, I’ve focused this analysis on when Android 15 first reached a flagship model that’s readily available in the US — either a carrier-connected model or an unlocked version of the phone, if such a product is sold by the manufacturer and readily available to US customers — in a public, official, and not opt-in-beta-oriented over-the-air rollout.

(To be clear, I’m not counting being able to import an international version of a phone from eBay or from some random seller on Amazon as being “readily available to US customers.” For the purposes of creating a reasonable and consistent standard for this analysis, a phone has to be sold in the US in some official capacity in order to be considered a “US model” of a device.)

By looking at the time to Android 15’s first appearance (via an over-the-air rollout) on a device in the US, we’re measuring how quickly a typical US device-owner could realistically get the software in a normal situation. And since we’re looking at the first appearance, in any unlocked or carrier-connected phone, we’re eliminating any carrier-specific delays from the equation and focusing purely on the soonest possible window you could receive an update from any given manufacturer in this country. We’re also eliminating the PR-focused silliness of a manufacturer rushing to roll out a small-scale upgrade in somewhere like Lithuania just so they can put out a press release touting that they were “FIRST,” when the practical implication of such a rollout is basically just a rounding error.

I chose to focus on the US specifically because that’s where this publication (and this person writing this right now — hi!) is based, but this same analysis could be done using any country as its basis, of course, and the results would vary accordingly.

All measurements start from the day Android 15 was released into the Android Open Source Project: September 3, 2024, which is when the final raw OS code finished uploading and became available to manufacturers.

The following scale determined each manufacturer’s subscores for upgrade timeliness:

• 1-14 days to first US rollout = A+ (100)
• 15-30 days to first US rollout = A (96)
• 31-45 days to first US rollout = A- (92)
• 46-60 days to first US rollout = B+ (89)
• 61-75 days to first US rollout = B (86)
• 76-90 days to first US rollout = B- (82)
• 91-105 days to first US rollout = C+ (79)
• 106-120 days to first US rollout = C (76)
• 121-135 days to first US rollout = C- (72)
• 136-150 days to first US rollout = D+ (69)
• 151-165 days to first US rollout = D (66)
• 166-180 days to first US rollout = D- (62)
• More than 180 days to first US rollout (and thus no upgrade activity within the six-month window) = F (0)

There’s just one asterisk: If a manufacturer outright abandons any US-relevant models of a device, its score defaults to zero for that specific category. Within that category (be it current or previous-gen flagship), such behavior is an indication that the manufacturer in question could not be trusted to honor its commitment and provide an upgrade. This adjustment allows the score to better reflect that reality. No such adjustments were made this year, though there have been instances where it’s happened in the past (hello, Moto — again!).

Last but not least, this analysis focuses on manufacturers selling flagship phones that are relevant and in some way significant to the US market and/or the Android enthusiast community. That, as I alluded to above, is why a company like Sony is no longer part of the primary analysis — and why companies like Xiaomi and Huawei are not presently part of this picture, despite their relevance in other parts of the world. Considering the performance of players in a market such as China would certainly be interesting, but it’d be a completely different and totally separate analysis, and it’s beyond the scope of what we’re considering in this one report.

Aside from the companies included here, most players are either still relatively insignificant in the US market or have focused their efforts more on the budget realm in the States so far — and thus don’t make sense, at least as of now, to include in this specific-sample-oriented and flagship-focused breakdown.

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