Through a post on microblogging site Twitter, the vice president of product management at HTC, Mr. Mo Versi, revealed that the promised November security updates for the company’s recently-released One A9 smartphone will go live Friday night onwards. The update is also expected to bring improvements to the camera performance and battery life of the smartphone, if the tweet is anything to go by. While it’s Saturday already and reports of the OTA update hitting One A9 handsets haven’t started pouring in as yet, it probably has a lot to do with the update being rolled out in phases, as is the norm, so One A9 owners in most regions should start seeing their OTA notifications sooner rather than later. Updates can also be checked for manually, by going into Setting > About Device > Updates on your phones.
As for the tweet from Mr. Versi that forms the basis of this report, on Friday evening, he posted the following on the microblogging site – “HTC One A9 Unlocked Owners! The latest security updates (Nov) including improvements to the camera and battery will be OTA’d out tonight!”. This follows earlier reports that stated HTC will indeed follow through with its commitment of pushing out Google’s monthly security updates. “We expect the software update with Google’s November security patches to receive Technical Acceptance later today and roll out to customers immediately thereafter”, is what an HTC spokesperson is believed to have told Android Central earlier.
The update of course, will only be for the unlocked model of the One A9. There’s no word on when carriers will push out the update to models locked to their networks, but it may take quite a while before that happens, as is the case more often than not. With Samsung, LG and Sony having already committed to following Google’s monthly security update schedule, it is heartening to see HTC starting to do the same as well, at least for some of their more premium models. However, with most devices in circulation still controlled by carriers, it might be a while before smartphone owners can get updates rolled out to them in a timely manner rather than having to wait for months to get basic security patches, as was the case with the Stagefright vulnerability not so long ago.