Samsung drops Galaxy S9 down to quarterly updates days after sending out April patch

Ben Schoon | Apr 5 2021 - 6:08 pm PT

After years of poor software support, Samsung has done a complete reversal and is now among the best in the business, at least on the Android side of things. As part of its schedule, though, phones occasionally drop from monthly updates to less frequent patches, and now the Galaxy S9 is moving down to quarterly updates.

Spotted by Droid-Life, Samsung has just moved the Galaxy S9 from its monthly update schedule down to its quarterly schedule. That means, well, exactly what it sounds like. From this point forward, the Galaxy S9 will only get four security patches per year, likely moving to the biannual schedule next year. The change applies to both the S9 and S9+ and the update remains on Android 10, which rolled out last February.

This change comes just a couple of days after Samsung rolled out a very timely April 2021 security patch to the Galaxy S9+, arriving even before some more recent Samsung smartphones. The regular Galaxy S9 started getting that same patch just a little while later. Going based on the quarterly schedule, the next update will likely arrive in July or August.

Notably, the S9’s predecessor, Galaxy S8, is still on the quarterly update schedule as well, as is the Galaxy Note 8, which was released that same year. Samsung will all but certainly move those phones down to biannual updates by next year though.