$1,500 could buy you the Galaxy S22 Ultra and still leave you some change for accessories or it could have bought Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Smartphone for Insiders. One gets updated every month with security patches and frequent OS tweaks, the other is still running on Android 11 and hasn’t seen an update of any kind since March 18th. For all the hype Qualcomm created for the Insiders phone, it’s surely letting its fans down by not supporting the phone meant to showcase everything good about the Snapdragon series of processors.
According to a Reddit thread that was first discovered by the XDA, the last update to roll out to the Insiders phone did so on March 18th and even that was obsolete due to the January security patch it was packing. We are now midway through June and there’s no sign of an Android 12 update and let’s not mention Android 13. Frankly, the four years’ worth of security updates promised for the Insiders phone hardly seems like it will be fulfilled.
Qualcomm isn’t entirely to blame for this debacle, ASUS is the ODM responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of the Insiders phone and as such carries part of the blame for such poor software support.
A Qualcomm moderator responded to a question on the Reddit thread with the news that a new security patch would be ‘released on June 20’ and that further patches would be released every two to three months after. There was no mention of Android 12, which isn’t a good sign if you were hoping to see the back of Android 11 any time soon.
When you splurge $1,500 on a smartphone, no matter who the manufacturer is, you expect the device to get regular software and security updates, and perhaps even run an up-to-date version of Android. Frankly, this isn’t good enough. And Qualcomm should do better for its fans.
If you happened to buy the Snapdragon Smartphone for Insiders, how do you feel about the update situation?
