NVIDIA SHIELD TV Android 10 update is never going to happen

Despite bowing out of the mobile market, NVIDIA managed to actually become an exemplar in the Android community, at least when it comes to software support. Years after it launched in SHIELD TV boxes, NVIDIA continued pushing updates both big and small beyond what most OEMs would have done in the past. Sadly, good things do come to an end, and the graphics tech giant has just confirmed that the SHIELD TV won't be getting Android 10, but that doesn't mean it won't be getting updates either.

The first SHIELD TV Android TV device launched back in 2015, and unless you've been keeping tabs on the Android TV market, you would have expected these to have been abandoned by now. In 2019, however, even those boxes got updated to the latest Android 9.0 version of Android TV and have continued to receive feature updates even today. With Android 12 just around the corner, however, owners have started asking about an Android 10 update for their faithful devices.

The official answer, unfortunately, is a no. To be more precise, NVIDIA says that it was a "no-op" for the company, meaning they decided to skip it. They decided that Android 10 for Android TV didn't carry big changes that would have benefited users but still required a lot of work to release.

That's not to say NVIDIA is done with the SHIELD TV, especially since its last SHIELD Experience update was released just last May. The same NVIDIA staff member hinted that there is still a lot of development going on for the platform, which can be a bit surprising for a line of devices whose latest model was launched back in 2019. Then again, with NVIDIA pushing its GeForce NOW streaming service, it's not that unexpected either.

There might also be a small chance that NVIDIA will just jump to Android 11, which probably accumulates a lot more substantial changes to the platform compared to Android 10. That, however, could be wishful thinking, but SHIELD TV owners might not be missing much from the latest Android TV releases, especially since NVIDIA provides its own experience on top anyway.