LG may be long gone from the smartphone game after exiting the market last year, but it’s not sent all its Android software engineers on holiday while it figures out what to do with them.
The company has just posted a roadmap revealing the planned software updates for the coming year, and while the Q52, Velvet and Wing handsets are all listed as just having security updates, the Q92 5G, V50 ThinQ and V50S ThinQ are all getting bang up to speed with Android 12.
This fulfils a promise that LG made after exiting the smartphone industry last year, when it pledged to deliver “up to three iterations of Android operating system updates from the year of purchase” for “all premium LG smartphones currently in use.”
The list of handsets cited above is all subject to change if there are unforeseen issues, and the upgrades are only promised for LG’s native South Korea for now. But it’s good news all the same for those who stuck with the company’s smartphones while pretty much everyone else was looking elsewhere.
If your LG phone isn’t listed — if you own a K model, or a Stylo, say — then it looks like you’re out of luck, and should probably think about upgrading your phone sooner rather than later.
And while Android 12 is planned for a handful of phones, we’d be surprised if you can expect Android 13 to follow suit. After all, at some point LG should probably pay these employees to work on something that’ll actually make some money, rather than providing ongoing support for a dead part of the business.
It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when LG was one of the biggest phone makers in the world. The move to smartphones didn’t seem to hurt LG in the same way that Nokia suffered, with the G2 and G3 providing genuine alternatives to the iPhone and Galaxy S series.
But as sales dipped, the company created more and more oddball designs. There was the LG G5 with modular add-ons you could enhance your phone with… theoretically anyway — the company only made two modules before jacking the idea in with the more conventional LG G6: a real kick in the teeth for those who backed the idea in the first place.
More recently, the LG Wing debuted a weird dual-screen concept, which let you use your phone in landscape and portrait mode simultaneously. Somewhat unfortunately, given its name, the LG Wing resolutely failed to take off.
All that said and done, leaving the market place was likely the right thing to do. But we will miss the wackiness in a world of identikit black oblongs.