Nobody, including yours truly, thought that Sony Mobile could get their house in order and release Android updates in a more timely manner but the latter part of 2016 began to prove critics wrong. In early Fall 2016, Sony announced that outside of Google, they wanted to be the first OEM to bring Android 7.1.1 to their fleet and they did exactly that at the beginning of January.

Now Sony is fulfilling another promise of theirs – to bring Android 7.0 Nougat to additional Xperia phones. Xperia Blog writes:

 Android 7.0 Nougat may shortly be released for the Xperia Z5/Z4 Tablet and Z3+ series, as Nougat firmware build 32.3.A.0.372 has just been certified by the PTCRB. Whilst the PTCRB, a cellular certification company, stopped publishing public links of new Xperia devices – links for the older devices still remain accessible. It shows that Sony will look to move the build number from 32.2.A.5.11 to version 32.3.A.0.372. Hopefully, this means the actual consumer release is, at most, a matter of weeks away. We’ll let you know once it starts rolling. 

Now it’s worth keeping in mind that Sony has a long way to go before we can begin to rely on them to release timely Android updates, mostly notably their backlog of devices which were to receive Android 7.0 Nougat and still haven’t. At the same time, bringing new Android updates is a challenge that all OEMs face as there exists a lot of restrictions from Google and carriers which slow down, if not make it impossible to update older devices.

Still, it’s nice to see Sony beat others like Samsung and HTC to an Android update and keep things moving by bringing Nougat to Xperia Z3+, Z5, and Z4 Tablet in the near future.