Android Nougat February update for Nexus and Pixel out soon

Before you get your hopes up, we’re not talking about a major update that will be coming to the Nexus and Pixel smartphone lines. We’re not even talking about the 7.1.2 update which has hit the beta testing platform not long ago, and isn’t considered a big patch.

We are actually talking about a regular update that will be hitting Android devices for the foreseeable future on a monthly basis. This is part of an initiative started by Google back in 2016, when it stated that updates will be done a bit differently when it comes to how people received their “doses of candy”.

To expand a bit on that, we are going to still get important, major updates every several months, as was the case with Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 7.1 Nougat after it. However, there will also be a series of small updates which will hit devices every month, and will feature important modification to the OS. This will also include security patches which will be updated constantly.

This approach on updates is not innovative, as we have seen other companies adopt this model as well. An example that comes to mind is Microsoft and its Windows 10 OS. New maintenance patches drop regularly, and feature small changes that can often times play a larger role in the grand scheme of things. They also include the newest security patches, which help keep the system clean and attack-free.

Owners of devices pertaining to either the Nexus or Pixel lines are first in line to receive the February batch, with more devices to follow suite sometime after. It is yet unknown when exactly the devices will receive the update, but it is believed that it shouldn’t take more than a day or two for the OTA update notifications to start rolling in. The new February update is said to contain some “critical” alteration to Android that Google deemed very important and impossible to delay.