LG Promises Three Years Of OS Updates For Some Remaining Phones

LG's official exit from the smartphone market has been one of the biggest and perhaps saddest news in the mobile market, especially considering LG's history and lineage. For owners of its phones, however, the announcement also brings with it worries about the future of their devices as far as software updates are concerned. To allay those fears, LG is making a very public commitment to continue supporting some of those phones for up to three years, of course with some important caveats to take note of.

That three-year pledge only applies to premium LG phones currently in the market, which covers only the LG G Series, the V series, the VELVET, and the most recent Wing. However, only phones in these categories launched since 2019 are actually covered, meaning some of those, like the LG G8 ThinQ and LG V50 ThinQ, would already be reaching their end of support.

LG also has something for mid-range phones under the Stylo and K families and those might actually have it better. 2020 models of these phones will be getting up to two years of major Android updates, which will hopefully last them up to 2022 at least.

The big question, however, is whether the company will actually be able to make good on that promise. It was indeed hinted that the LG is still planning to launch Android 12 for some of its most recent phones but, at the moment, it has barely been able to push Android 11. One can only hope that it will now have more time to focus on software development and support since it won't be worrying about production and sales anymore.

That said, LG does say that it will still continue producing phones through the second quarter of 2021 just to fulfill contractual obligations to its partners. Given the overall atmosphere, however, it's probably unlikely that those partners will be motivated to push the phones to their customers, even with this "Three Year Pledge".