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Comment by nextweek2 | Hacker News Reader

The reason is a staged rollout, they seem to start slow (probably to catch early issues then ramp up).

I was only offered the 8.0 on my Nexus 5X last Thursday. Whilst the release might have been a month earlier I think the gradual rollout is to help frontline help desks and App developers.

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Sure, Google run staggered rollouts for the Nexus/Pixel line, but all the other OEMs (Samsung, OnePlus, etc) take months to release their customized OS versions, if they ever do.

In addition, Android devices often have very short OS update support lifecycles (2 years seems to be common), while iOS 11 looks to be supporting as far back as the iPhone 5S (2013)

Why do they do staged rollouts instead of just releasing the OS for all ala iOS?

iOS rollouts are staged.

If by staged you mean that some people download the beta a couple months before the release date then yes. But on the release date iOS is released to all consumers with supported devices.

iOS updates are available for everyone at the same time, but Apple does stagger the update notifications. So users that know an update is available can go to Settings and find it immediately, but notifications go out in stages after the release.

Sure, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's enough to say that Apple releases it all at once. Apple stages their updates over the course of hours, maybe a few days tops. The Android+Custom Skin sort of staging ends up spacing things out over months.

I never understood why Google's Nexus/Pixel security updates are staggered over weeks, leaving a lot of people vulnerable.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/123401/are-stag...

No it isn't. The reason is very few people have Nexus/Pixel phones and they're pretty much the only ones that can get 8.0.

7.1 is only installed on 1.6% of phones and that has been 'available' for nearly a year!!

For context, I have Samsung tablet at home, that is still being currently sold by the company as new. It is stuck on 4.4.4. They have "no plans" to issue an update, according to support.

Stage rollout is usually done over hours and days, not months. Apple also uses staged rollouts but you'll usually get the notification within 12 hours after release.

Not with OS updates. Even Windows can take months to push major updates after availability. This isn't just to take the load off of Google's CDN (they could honestly handle all of the Nexus/Pixel owner's downloading a 1GB update the same day without noticing a blip on resource usage). They want to avoid some device-bricking or otherwise major bugs happening, which is easier with a slowly staged rollout. Impatient users can always install manually with minimal effort.

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