A lot has been said in the past few months about mobile OS security and how difficult it is to get updates pushed out in a timely manner. And with the Android 6.0 Marshmallow version launching with the the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P — and coming to a slew of other Nexus devices as updates — Google is doing things one better.
Being transparent about security updates is almost as important as the update itself.
In the wake of serious (but too often overblown) “Stagefright” issue, Google announced that it would begin issuing monthly security updates to its Nexus line. And we’ve already started to see them. (A minimum of 12 over-the-air updates a year likely will have some interesting implications on its own, but we’re also not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.) But new on the Nexus phones at today’s launch event was an extra entry in the settings section — a little bit of transparency telling us, the user, when the phone last received a security update, listed under “Android Security Patch Level.”
This is more important than a meaningless version number. In plain English (or presumably whatever language your phone is set to) you’ll known when you last received one of these monthly updates. No having to decipher a build number. It’s just there.
We expect to see this on all Nexus devices in the near future. And hopefully we’ll see the other manufacturers implement this same sort of thing as well.
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Nexus 5X
- Nexus 5X review
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- Nexus 5X specs
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