While many carriers and OEMs are starting to roll out Android Marshmallow, it doesn’t mean that updates to Lollipop aren’t happening. Case in point: Verizon and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Over the weekend the US carrier announced that the Lollipop 5.1.1 build was rolling out to the Note 4, months after it was released by Google and seeming after a vast majority of carriers had already rolled out the update to their devices. Still, better late than never as Note 4 users will certainly have the advantages of this much improved build of Lollipop over the .0 build.
The updated build according to Verizon is LMY47X.N910VVRU2BOK3 for those keeping score at home and there are three major things highlighted in the release notes for the build.
- Supports Android for Work. To learn more, go to https://www.google.com/work/android/
- Upgrades to Samsung Knox Platform, a comprehensive suite of mobile enterprise security solutions
- Removes pre-loaded Amazon Appstore and Amazon Widgets from the device
All of these changes are including along with the general performance and security updates of Lollipop 5.1.1.
As with any update to the base OS, the question of when you will see this update on your Verizon Note 4 is the most important one. The update is rolling out now but like all updates, they are staged so it could be a few days or even a week before you see the update come to your phone. You can of course always manually check by going to Settings>About Phone>System Updates but
Galaxy Note 4
that is no guarantee it will come to you any sooner.
I appreciate that I sound like a broken record but it is these types of significant delays in rolling out updates by carriers that are hurting the Android platform. Yes there certainly needs to be an improved update mechanism by Google themselves, but carriers are taking far too long to update devices on their network. Verizon is not alone in this as the Nexus 6 sold on the AT&T network still hasn’t seen the Marshmallow 6.0 update yet T-Mobile and other carriers are rolling out the 6.0.1 update already.
