Pixel 6/Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7/Pro devices are moving to a quarterly update schedule instead of monthly secuirty patches

General News
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We are moving to a more sustainable, high-impact Quarterly Update
Schedule for legacy hardware. [..]
• Current Status: Your device remains secure on the December build.
• The Next Leap: Expect your next major system update and Feature Drop in March 2026.

The missing updates were first spotted by Droid-Life, which asked Google about the missing support. The company replied that these devices will “remain security compliant” for their full support period.

Google says affected devices are still secure or “security compliant” while stuck on security patch levels of 2025-12-05. Meanwhile pixel security bulletin for Jan/Feb require patch levels of 2026-01-05 & 2026-02-05 respectively.

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Pixel 7 is “legacy hardware" now?

That’s an interesting way to phrase it.

Thanks Google.

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“This isn’t about doing less; it’s about ensuring the updates you do get are actually worth the bandwidth”

If this phrase was about feature updates okay, however we are talking about security updates that is worth the bandwidth.
This wording is very misleading and manipulative.

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It’s very much “we don’t want to invest in resting security updates as frequently, so we will do testing once a quarter to save resources”.

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Samsung do something similar. I was always a little worried Google would not be interested in investing the effort/resources to support so many devices (to the same level) at the same time. They have gone from supporting devices for three years (give or take) for the Pixel 1 - 5, to five years Pixel 6 & 7 and seven years with the Pixel 8 - 10. It’s a drastic increase in device support load.

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Speculation: Their security engineers were burning out at a faster rate. Policy change is worth it because Google isn’t well known for “privacy”

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I don’t recall GrapheneOS raising the alarm over this. I’ll get worried when GOS gets worried.

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I noticed this too and wondered if Google would do the same. When I saw that updates weren’t coming as frequently to the Pixel 6 I thought that it might have been Google adopting this position only for the older hardware which wasn’t originally going to get updates. Now it looks like this will be the case in general.

For most people I think this is fine. Long term support, even if it’s quarterly, is still really good. However, for folks like us who want to stay on a monthly cadence we will likely have to upgrade sooner.

Also, I don’t think iOS has a confirmed schedule for when the receive updates, so I would still consider this to be competitive to iPhones for how long you can expect your device to be supported.

I’ll note that Samsung says that some of their devices will only receive biannual updates, though none are listed under that at this time. Let’s see how long Google will go before considering this as well.

Maybe the 7 years of security updates was too good to be true, lol.

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Based on the wording I think it was almost certainly written by a LLM