When Sony unveiled their plans for Android 7.0 Nougat, quite a few phones from their past releases made the cut, including the Xperia Z4 Tablet. However, missing from that list was the Xperia Z3 which, despite sounding old (seeing how Sony releases new phones every six months), is actually only a two year old device. Soon after, many just assumed that this was Sony not doing their due diligence and ditching older hardware but that might not be the case at all. In fact, Sony may not have had a choice in all of this.

As the gang at XperiaBlog writes:

 However, the absence of the Xperia Z3 on that Nougat list is not Sony’s fault. Devices that get upgraded to new Android versions need to pass Google’s Compatibility Test Suite (CTS). The CTS was updated during the Android N Developer Preview programme which meant that to comply with the certification requirements, Sony never released the final preview (DP5) firmware on the Xperia Z3. The last update was the ‘DP4’ firmware.

So what exactly changed in the CTS? Well, it seems that Google now requires devices to have graphics that support either Vulkan or OpenGL ES 3.1. This means that any device that is now running Adreno 3XX graphics, such as the Xperia Z3’s Adreno 330 GPU as seen on all Snapdragon 800 and 801 chipsets, cannot be updated to Android 7.0. This is because the Snapdragon 800/801 only supports OpenGL ES 3.0.

So even if Sony wanted to deliver the official Android 7.0 update for the Xperia Z3 its hands were tied. Instead, you can blame Google for updating the CTS or you can blame Qualcomm for not supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, although to be fair to Qualcomm, OpenGL ES 3.1 was launched after the release of the Snapdragon 800/801 chipsets. 

If all this pans out, this is what happens when no company controls the entire product stack and keep in mind, this phenomenon isn’t limited to Sony. It was thought that the HTC M8, a phone released in 2014 would also receive Nougat, only for HTC to backtrack on that, likely due to the same reasons that prevents Sony from releasing Nougat on Xperia Z3. As of right now, a good rule of thumb is to assume any phone more than 18 months old might not get the next iteration of Android.

Discuss:

Is your phone slated to receive Nougat?