- Sony won't deliver the final Android update it had promised for the Xperia 10 VI
- This is due to issues with the phone's storage configuration
- While the explanation seems reasonable, it also shows that these support commitments might not be guarantees
Nowadays, most Android phones are sold with the promise of a fixed number of major Android version updates, with top-end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S26 series and the Google Pixel 11 line promising an impressive seven. But it seems these promises might, in some cases, be more hopeful than guaranteed.
While neither Google nor Samsung have so far shown any sign of reneging on their update commitments, Sony just did with the Xperia 10 VI.
In a support post spotted by Phandroid, the company explained that while it had originally promised that the Sony Xperia 10 VI would receive three Android version updates, it will actually only receive two, as “due to limitations related to the device’s storage configuration, the Xperia 10 VI does not support an Android 17 upgrade experience that we consider adequate.”
The phone will at least still receive the promised four years of security updates, and Sony claims that this issue won’t affect other models, but it goes to show that these support promises aren’t as ironclad as you might have expected.
This could be the first of many rollbacks
Of course, if updating the Sony Xperia 10 VI would genuinely have degraded the experience of using it, Sony probably made the right choice in not doing so. But that’s cold comfort for anyone who bought the phone off the back of Sony’s update commitment.
And who’s to say something similar couldn’t happen with other phones, whether those from Sony or other brands. In fact, expensive high-end phones might be even more at risk of unfulfilled commitments, with most offering up to seven years of promised updates; seven years is a long time in the tech world, so who’s to say whether Android 24 will actually work well on a phone that launched this year.
So, if you weren’t already doing so, you should probably take any support commitments as a goal rather than a guarantee.