Google's Pixel 3 and 3 XL smartphones get their final update

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All good things come to an end, they say, but sometimes those things come to an end too soon and with little reason. After three years in service, the Pixel 3 and its larger sibling, the Pixel 3 XL, are getting their very last maintenance update, one that's arriving a bit later than expected. Unfortunately, the end of software updates for these models seems to have arrived earlier than necessary, especially since there doesn't appear to be many technical reasons for Google to stop the flow.

The Pixel 3 handsets launched backed in 2018, so at least in terms of guarantees, Google already fulfilled its software promises. The phones reached their end-of-life updates back in October, but the company had promised a final cumulative update, something it had previously done for the Pixel 2. Consumers had nearly given up hope on receiving this final update, but 9to5Google reports that it has finally arrived.

The Pixel 3 February update is a minor one, but it's important because it is the last update the phones will ever receive from Google. The release contains the accumulated security patches and bug fixes from November 2021 to February 2022, so the model isn't missing out on anything yet. The Pixel 3 and 3 XL did get an update last month to fix the strange and dangerous Microsoft Teams bug, but that was the full extent of that update.