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Android P Drops Support For Nexus Phones, Pixel Tablet (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-the-road dept.

Google has launched the first developer preview of Android P, the company's new mobile operating system that brings new features and improvements over Android Oreo. Unfortunately, developers will only have a small set of blessed hardware to choose from with Android P: the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL. Google's Nexus smartphones and Pixel C tablet will not get Android P when it's fully released. The Verge reports: Eventually, Android P will ship on new phones from other manufacturers, along with the handful of handsets that third-parties bother to update, but there are a couple Android mainstays that won't get to enjoy this marvelous future: Google's Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P phones, and the oft-forgotten Pixel C tablet. As Ars Technica confirmed with Google, those devices won't be getting Android P when it's released fully. Also, as Android Police notes, there's no Developer Preview image for the Nexus Player, which came out in 2014, so it might be done getting updates as well. It's 2018, and we're beyond the two years of major OS update support these devices were promised, so this isn't hugely surprising. All three devices will continue to get monthly security updates through at least November of this year, but they'll remain stuck on Android 8.1 for an underlying OS as far as official Google updates go.

2 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re: That Which Shall Not Be Named by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You don't know what you're talking about. I code for both platforms, and Apple's processors are hands down faster; while Androids keep melting in my hand under load. I've seen several Nexus devices throttle the clock speed down by half when under only 70% load. When will android manufacturers realize that plastic housings make terrible heat sinks? Apple phones are great a dissipating heat with metal/glass backs.

  2. Pretty disappointed by trawg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I bought my Nexus 5X quite late (bit more than a year ago). This is my third Nexus phone - started with Nexus One, then Nexus 4, now this one).

    I didn't expect to get much more than two years of core Android updates from it and it seems that's what I'm going to get.

    I'm not disappointed by that - two years for a relatively low end phone (I paid AUD$450 for it new) isn't too bad. But I am massively disappointed by the fact that Google have erased the Nexus line and expect me to jump up to a top-tier phone - over twice as expensive - so that I can make sure I get the latest operating system updates reliably.

    There's Android One but after reading their website I still can't figure out exactly what the hell it is. I think it's basically the latest version of Android but if you buy one of those phones, you're "guaranteed" to not get any of the usual vendor crap installed on top of it.

    Of course it doesn't matter because I can't seem to buy them in Australia anyway without going through importers.

    I feel like Google is missing a massive opportunity to have a Google-branded mid-range phone. But many of my friends were happy to shell out for the Pixel so maybe I'm just a grumpy cheapskate outlier :D