Samsung's ancient Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are still receiving software updates

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Samsung's ancient Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are still receiving software updates
Commercially released almost four years ago on Android 5.0 Lollipop, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge naturally received Marshmallow and Nougat goodies back in 2016 and 2017, but no Oreo love despite several false alarms and inaccurate reports that got our hopes up last year. Technically, the standard three-year window for security updates closed a while ago as well, but believe it or not, Samsung continues to provide solid software support as far as these two classic high-end phones are concerned.

Earlier today, SamMobile got wind of new updates delivered over-the-air to the GS6 and S6 Edge in the United Arab Emirates, and you can probably expect these maintenance releases to expand to other regions over the next few hours or, at worst, days. Even though Samsung is reportedly rolling out Google's January security patches instead of the latest batch of UI optimizations and enhancements, it's certainly rare to see 2019 software running on 2015 hardware.

If you're somehow still in possession of such an ancient handset with a flat or "edgy" 5.1-inch screen, relatively chunky bezels, and an Exynos 7420 processor under the hood, you may not be that shocked to receive this newest software update. After all, the previous one rolled out just a few months ago, including the November 2018 security patch level.

This might be a good sign of things to come for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, which are still guaranteed monthly security updates, according to the official Samsung Mobile Security webpage, but most likely not for long. It would definitely be nice of Samsung to move its early 2016 flagships to a quarterly schedule rather than halt their support altogether this spring. Of course, three major OS updates instead of two would be even sweeter, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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