We’re Still Waiting for LG’s Global Update Center to Make a Difference

In April of this year, we wrote a story with the headline, “LG is Taking Software Updates Seriously Now, Opens Software Upgrade Center.” News that LG was opening a center dedicated to software updates had us excited, due to the act that LG has been rather slow with regard to software updates. If it was going to take an entire center filled with engineers to quicken its software update pace, so be it.

Unfortunately, as we creep closer to September, 2018 we’re coming upon a realization that this Global Update Center may not be improving much at all.

Announced this week, LG has a few updates in the works, specifically for V20, G6, G7, and Q6 owners. The most important of these announced updates is Oreo for V20. Yes, we said Oreo. Oreo was released in August, 2017, while V20 was released in October, 2016. The phone is not even two years old, yet it’s still on Nougat. If I was a V20 owner, I’d be livid.

Let’s use a phone from another OEM as an example. Moto Z DROID from Motorola was released in 2016, too, but it received Oreo in June. We’re using Motorola as the example because they have also become somewhat slow when it comes to major OS Updates.

Announced, but not coming soon

The kicker is, LG announced these updates, but they are scheduled to release in South Korea first, then make their way to other markets (including the US) in “the coming months.” As a reminder, Android Pie is now official and already running on some phones. By the time Pie is on enough phones to be listed on Google’s Android distribution charts, maybe V20 owners will have Oreo. While we know this is life as an Android user, doesn’t that sound unreasonable to you, too?

Of note, while many OEMs have announced which of their devices will receive Android Pie, LG has yet to do that. The company hasn’t even mentioned it as far as we know.

Looking back through our records, even LG’s new phones hardly get much update love. The G7 ThinQ has picked up just one update from what we can tell, the July security patch and a couple new features. How about the V30? It received Oreo in a much more timely fashion, getting it back in March, followed by the ThinQ update in April. Since then, it’s seen one security patch update.

We understand updates take time and LG has a lot of phones to manage all over the world, but when we first heard of this update center, maybe we expected too much too quickly. We’ll be sure to adjust our expectations moving forward, yet we’re still going to light a fire under their behinds to push those updates quickly.