The update to iOS 18 will arrive on Monday, September 16, starting with the iPhone XR. Normally, I’d be a little envious that the 2018 iPhones are still getting the latest version of iOS six years later, but Android has stepped up its game, and the Pixels now promise seven years of updates. Another thing is when the update comes.
If there’s anything I’m looking forward to in iOS 18, it’s this. will arrive on all supported iPhones this Mondayinstead of the despair that Android updates fail to escape, despite Google’s efforts to improve them.
The only thing I envy about iOS is its deployment.
I don’t care what’s new in iOS 18, some of which already exist on Android and others that won’t even be ready on day one. Android and iOS are pretty similar these days, to the point that there’s nothing in the list of changes in iOS 18 that particularly catches my attention. Except for its deployment.
All compatible iPhones will receive the update on the same day, while On Android it’s maddening to wait for the update to arrive. It has been like this since the beginning and everything indicates that it will continue to be like this in the future. This year, even the Google Pixels did not receive Android 15 instantly, but rather Google released the open source AOSP version on September 4 and the Pixels will arrive at least a month later. For other Android phones, we don’t even know.
We already know the reason. Apple develops both iOS and iPhone, with one generation every year, while Google is in charge of Android and every mobile brand launches hundreds of mobile phones with different hardware and software. Google is preparing new Android features and each manufacturer adapts, modifies or adds to them. This creates an additional delay until new versions of Android are available on other phones. For a manufacturer, updating Android is a long process, as Sony and Nokia have made us aware in the past.
In 2018, Sony explained the Android update process, in ten steps in total.
Google has tried to simplify the process with initiatives like Project Treble, but even though times have sped up a bit, it’s still months before the first non-Google phones get the latest version of Android. In some cases, the update comes a year later or when the beta program for the next version is already very advanced. Updates are obsolete as soon as they arrive.
Android Mobiles receive news on several fronts in addition to system updates, but this does not mean that as a user you want to receive the latest soon or, at least, on a specific date. The problem is that in many cases users do not know when the new version of Android will arrive and the update schedules, which are not always respected, are usually accurate to the nearest quarter.
Unfortunately, no solution seems to be on the horizon. What makes Android great is the cause of one of its major drawbacksso the only way Android would behave like iOS is if there were only a handful of Android phones released by Google, a total bore. I’d rather wait for the update to come and be a little envious of iOS, like every year at this time.
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