Every phone has a finite life when it comes to firmware updates, after which it is no longer commercially viable for the company to keep producing updates or it could be the case that the hardware no longer supports future upgrades. Well, Sony Mobile has today confirmed that a number of its older smartphones will “not receive any further software upgrade support”.
The phones which are no longer supported on the software side are anywhere between 18 months and two years old, so most people wouldn’t necessarily expect support beyond this time frame. We understand that the full list of phones where software support is now EoL includes the following models: Xperia arc S, Xperia S, Xperia SL, Xperia ion, Xperia acro S, Xperia go, Xperia P, Xperia J, Xperia miro, Xperia sola, Xperia tipo and Xperia U.
We appreciate that Sony Mobile is now providing some transparency over when software support for a phone has ceased. At least it avoids people hoping and wishing for an update. You will notice that Sony has begun to update some of the support pages for the above mentioned phones under the Android version overview, which says “Latest & final version” for the phones where software support has ended.
We can imagine that this may upset some customers, but looking at it objectively, if you are one of those affected, how long did you expect software support to last? Do you think support ended too soon for your phone? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.
