One of Samsung’s best phones ever is now officially retired

Four years after its launch, the Samsung Galaxy S8 has received its last security update. The Galaxy S8 was a well-timed success story for Samsung, launching in the spring of 2017 with a bold design that drew attention away from the well-documented Galaxy Note 7 battery problems of the previous six months.

The S8 marked a design shift for Galaxy devices, with a wider-aspect edge-to-edge screen with minimal bezels that made it one of the best-looking phones we’d seen at that point. It wasn’t just a good-looking device, either; it offered excellent hardware and a great camera, combined with a remarkably restrained software implementation. Best of all, the batteries did not catch fire.


While the S8 and S8 Plus have reached the end of that support period, the S8 Active is still on the schedule for quarterly updates and the S8 Lite is on the biannual schedule.Samsung recently introduced a formal policy of providing Galaxy devices with four years of security updates, including both S-series flagships and even budget-oriented A-series models. Premium devices tend to get monthly updates, at least for the first couple of years, with the cadence slowing down to quarterly or biannual updates toward end of life. It’s one of the best support policies in the industry — certainly for Android, and roughly on par with Apple’s typically lengthy device support schedule.

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