When it comes to security updates, the recent most devices in the product portfolio take the precedence. Well, you can find occasional exceptions too, e.g. Samsung Galaxy S9 started to get the August patches before the current flagship aka the Galaxy S10 family.
Sony, however, maintains the usual hierarchy. Their 2019 flagship offering – Xperia 1 – received August patches along with the whole XZ2 family last week. Xperia 10 and 10 Plus, which are the mid ranger counterparts of Xperia 1, got the same update merely a day later.
The Japanese OEM maintains some crazy nomenclatures, so you may find it hard to believe: Xperia XZ3 is basically a member of XZ2 lineup. This phone also got the August patch a few days ago.
Sony engineers prefer to publish the kernel source code in their repo ahead of public rollout, so we decided to take a look there. The hunch was successful, as the new build (47.2.A.10.107) for Xperia XZ1 family and XZ Premium was spotted there.
FYI, the affermention phone trio are from 2017, and all three run Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC inside. The last software version they got was 47.2.A.10.80, which also bundled June security patches.
The new source is mainly concerned about an internal video driver update, although the size of the OTA is quite large (over 400 MB).
We are not sure why Sony opted for an older (July) security patch for Xperia XZ Premium and Xperia XZ1/XZ1 Compact, but the real show stealer here is none other than Xperia XA1 Plus.
The Helio P20 powered phone was released in 2017 as well, but it never got an major update over factory installed Android 8.0 (not even 8.1) Oreo!
Believe it or not, but this one (or at least the dual SIM variant with model number G3416) now runs August security patches – thanks to a new OTA that bumps the software version to 48.1.A.2.122. Well, Pie update is still a far fetched dream.
Due to the staged rollout model, you may need to wait a little before your phone grabs the OTA package. As an alternative, you can manually download the decrypted firmware package (known as FTF) and flash it manually.
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Kingshuk De
896 Posts
I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.
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