Honor promises two full years of software updates for the Honor 8

The newly-announced Honor 8 flagship has a lot going for it, and now there’s something else. According to the phone’s Product Manager, Taylor Wimberly, the Honor 8 — and phones that proceed it, apparently — will be getting software updates for a full 24 months after its launch:

From this year we are making a commitment to provide customers with access to new features (at least once every three months during the first 12 months) for up to 24 months following each product launch. We will keep providing access to security and software updates to fix bugs and enhance user experience in a timely manner.

In a world where Android phones struggle to get the latest updates in anything close to a timely manner, this is great news. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that those quarterly updates will be super-fast updates to the latest major versions of Android. This just promises “new features” every few months that will “enhance user experience”.

We waited to hold off on publishing this article because the wording of the original post, as you can see above, is a bit confusing. The original post promises at least 12 months of quarterly updates for “up to” 24 months, which could be translated as saying that there will only be a maximum of 24 months of updates. We’ve since gotten confirmation from Huawei, however, that the popular interpretation of this announcement is correct. The Honor 8 and future smartphones will indeed be getting 24 months worth of updates.

We went hands-on with the Honor 8 at the Huawei subsidiary’s event in San Francisco last week, so check out our video. And stay tuned for our full review of the glass-backed $399 flagship coming soon.