Samsung’s customer reps keep saying that the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 will get Android 10, despite the company’s official roadmap. Again. So maybe, just maybe, Samsung has changed its mind?
It seems unlikely, but let’s review the facts so far.
On September 2019 Samsung announced its decision not to update the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 phones to Android 10 despite being its 2017 flagship. The shameless decision fell in line with previous upgrade policy from the Korean company, but it still was especially surprising because Samsung is updating the Galaxy A7 to Android 10. That’s a phone that arguably has much less firepower than the S8 and that was released in the same year.
The decision to not support its 2017 flagship is entirely a marketing one, not a technical one. Simply, if you want a flasgship with the latest and greatest OS, you must burn your credit card into a new Galaxy or Note every two years — period. Compare that to Apple, who last year released iOS 13 for every iPhone all the way down to the iPhone 6s and the humble iPhone SE, which were released in 2015 and 2016, respectively.
But I digress. Regardless of this being a shameless and shameful planned obsolescence move, in November 2019 we got a glimmer of hope: Samsung‘s customer care told a “disgruntled Galaxy S8 owner” that his phone will get the Android 10 update after all.
Of course, this may have been a glitch in the Matrix — a lone and embarrassed customer rep telling a user what he wanted to hear.
But today SamMobile reports of new signs from Samsung’s customer care, whose reps are still repeating the same thing: the Galaxy S8 and the Note 8 will get the Android 10 update in 2020. Here’s a screenshot of an exchange:
Again, it could still be a case of reps saying whatever in error. But it seems that there may be a pattern here. Could this be true? Are these two models really “eligible to receive the new Android 10 version“? Is deployment really happening “during this year 2020”?
We can only hope so. Otherwise, Samsung, you are really screwing up for a lot of people.
