Xperia Z5 family unlikely to get ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ patches

Sony Mobile has spoken of its plan to issue patches to fix the widely-documented ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ CPU vulnerabilities. We always felt it likely that these patches (updated with Android security updates from 5 January 2018 and onwards) would only appear on the latest Xperia models. Judging by a reply from Sony Mobile’s Twitter support, it looks like that may well be the case.

Sony confirmed in the tweet that that the “Xperia Z5 Premium will not get a security patch update for ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’”. If the Xperia Z5 Premium won’t, then this also applies to the entire Xperia Z5 family (including the Z3+ and Z4 Tablet), as these models are all updated at the same time with same firmware build numbers.

Sony has not updated the firmware of the Xperia Z5 family since October 2017, so we weren’t holding out for any other updates. Regardless, are we asking too much of Sony to support handsets that are well over two years old now? Should Sony make exceptions for critical vulnerabilities, such as ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’? We’d love to hear your views below.

Thannks Tyw77!