Much like the Galaxy S22 series announced earlier this year, the Galaxy Z Flip 4 is going to get four years of software updates and five years of security updates. That’s more than the Galaxy Z Flip 3 was promised last year. Samsung still has a bit of a hill to climb to compete with Apple, but it’s better than the three years most other phones are promised.
Samsung trails only Google in terms of software updates
Google has an unfair advantage with software updates, since it makes its own hardware and also develops Android itself. But Samsung is not far behind them when it comes to software updates. For Samsung, the question used to be, will my phone get updated? Instead of when. Now it’s when. And Samsung has gotten pretty fast with updates, in fact it has already opened its Android 13 beta program with One UI 5, and Google has not even released the stable version of Android 13 yet. So we could see Android 13 land on some Samsung smartphones pretty quickly after Google releases it. This has helped Samsung cement itself as the second place (sometimes first) OEM in the world. Now Apple does still offer about six years of software updates, and only just stopped updating the iPhone 6S this year, but they also make every single part of the phone. The hardware, chipset and software. Samsung doesn’t do much of the software, and often times uses Qualcomm chipsets, so it has to deal with Qualcomm being slow with updating its processor binaries. But this is all good news for potential Galaxy Z Flip 4 buyers.
