Robert Triggs / Android Authority
For years and years, Apple’s fans can stop it on the heads of Android users that their platform is a place to achieve regular, reliable system updates, making their devices work well with the latest new features. This is still true when we are looking at some Android devices, but the situation has become one Whole Lot Better, and if you are shaking the mainstream handset like a pixel or a galaxy, you don’t have to worry to a great extent when talking about updates.
And that’s great. For the phone.
Android ambitions do not start and end with portable hardware, though, and for more than a decade we have been able to turn Android TV as a platform to feed our entertainment needs. Whether you have found a TV with Android TV, or you are adding it through an external stick or box, OS has not only offered a simple way to access our favorite series of services, but also offers smart home controls in a pinch – and even like sports.
In 2025, buyers know what to expect from Android updates on the phone. But with Android TV, this is someone’s guess.
But although the latest information on Android phones is good and predicted, the situation on Android TV may not be different – and it also includes modern Google TV interface -operating devices. On Android TV, access to system updates is still a Wild West, and the results are still felt by Sony TV owners.
Google’s latest big platform release, Android TV 14, its one -year birthday is coming next month. But despite being so long, many users are still running old software. And that is why when we saw Sony TV receiving his Android TV 14’s updates earlier this week, he felt like such a big news.
Ryan Hans / Android Authority
If you have seen our coverage at the moment, you already know what the mess has come out. Although the company is really updating some of its sets, it is surprisingly vague what models are due to these models, and when it was initially targeting Sony hardware, they are targeting the hardware, the user’s reports are less likely to be reported. Many people are still stuck on the old Android TV release, and even if you are digging through Sony’s support pages, you find firmware downloads that you can manually install, we are seeing that the updates of Android TV 14 are not yet available for hardware.
We do not mean to pile up Sony here (though we have received numerous comments about updates Barking TV that certainly pause us), and while this recent event does not leave the company very well, the issue of Android TV updates is a problem with this manufacturer. It is local throughout the platform.
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Buy a Android phone today, and you know what to expect in terms of updates: you will get a big platform release for so many years, and security patches for so many years. Spend so much money on a new TV, though, and you are probably going completely in the dark about what level you can expect. Blessed, Android TV releases come up with less frequencies than Android included in the mainstream, but it is as if the manufacturers are not trying to set the customer’s expectations here, to a large extent just completely ignore this question.
When you see how long we keep the TV around, it’s the most disappointing. With the phone, we are now at the point where software support is more than hardware life in most cases. If you are not just breaking your phone after a few years, you are trading it for a new model. But with TV, many of us are happy to see the same screen five years or more easily, and there is little pressure to chase a hot new model every year.
So why is the situation not reversed? Why are big, obvious devices that stare at us on the wall for an annual year where long -term help is a priority?
We have kept TV around us for years, and the lack of clear messaging around the expectations of the update is not crazy.
In fact, a part of this different approach is understood. What we need from Android on TV is quite different from what we want to get out of the phone, and access to preferences like security, and new features of communication does not affect TV. But this expert also does nothing to forgive the NEY, unnecessarily confused messaging (or lack) to surround the availability of updates – at least tell users what to be expected.
If Google wants to take Android TV and Google TV seriously like your mobile platform, it needs to be guided by discussing updates, and seeing that manufacturers follow it. But now, buyers are basically blind. This is far from a problem that cannot be resolved, but all the companies involved have to decide whether to resolve it.
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