Verizon Wireless has announced that the rollout for the March security update optimized for its version of the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge smartphone has officially started earlier today. The update upgrades the device’s firmware version to LRX22C.N915VVRU2BPA4 and according to Verizon, it only includes the latest Android security patch. In other words, this isn’t a major operating system update and your Android OS version will remain unchanged after it’s downloaded and installed on your device.
As usual, it may take a while before you actually get the update on your Galaxy Note 4 Edge. If you’re particularly impatient, you can always try to manually download the security patch which may or may not work. To attempt that, navigate to Settings > General > About device > Software updates and tap the “Check for updates” option. In an unlikely case in which you encounter any issues, connect your phone to a PC or Mac and update it via the Verizon Software Assistant tool which can be installed on pretty much every contemporary Windows and OS X machine by clicking on the “auto play pop up” after you plug your device into it.
As for the exact contents of this security patch, they are mostly dedicated to fixing various issues related to the so-called “mediaserver”. Mediaserver (yes, that’s definitely the correct spelling) is the name of one of Android core functions used for accessing both local and remote content which most often come into play when Android needs a way to access contents of an MMS and perform browser playback of various media files. Up until this security update, some rather specific vulnerabilities in the mediaserver allowed a potential attacker to cause memory corruption and remote code execution by basically mimicking the mediaserver process. Luckily, that’s all patched up now.
This March security update for the Galaxy Note Edge on Verizon network comes less than a week after the US carrier started rolling out the same patch on the latest two Samsung flagship devices – Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The update originally started rolling out on March 7th and given how the Galaxy Note 4 Edge isn’t exactly the latest and greatest smartphone on the market, two weeks isn’t that bad of a wait. Verizon will hopefully continue this trend of supporting its older Samsung models with security patches in a relatively swift manner, at least for the foreseeable future.