From now on, Samsung will no longer provide the Galaxy S20 and Note 20 series with the latest security updates every month. But that’s better news than you might think at first glance – also for the Galaxy S20 FE.
Addition: Samsung has now changed its mind and the Galaxy S20 FE and Note 20 (Ultra) will receive the latest updates monthly for the time being. For these phones, it hasn’t even been four years since they were officially released, after all.
Galaxy S20 will receive updates for longer
When Samsung launched the Galaxy S20 series in early 2020, the South Koreans’ update policy was very different. Phones were launched without very concrete promises about future updates and upgrades.
Fortunately, those promises have become increasingly concrete in recent years. For example, it has been clear since 2021 that the Galaxy S20 will receive security updates for four years: until early 2024. When Samsung announced in early 2022 that it would give some phones five-year updates, the S20 was missing from that list. So everything seemed clear.
And so we expected that Samsung would remove the Galaxy S20 from the list of supported phones one of these days. After all, it has now been more than four years since the devices ended up in stores.
Nothing turns out to be further from the truth. Because although Samsung will officially update the Galaxy S20 less often from today, the crux here is that the devices are still on the update list. Normally, Samsung implements such an ‘update downgrade’ a year before the end of the support period. And so it looks like the Galaxy S20 series – just like the Galaxy S21, S22 and Galaxy S23 – will receive a total of five years of security updates:
Funnily enough, we already touched on the first hint here a year ago, when Samsung did not implement an ‘update downgrade’ three years after the release of the Galaxy S20.
Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy S20 FE
This ‘move’ may also have positive consequences for the Galaxy Note 20 (Ultra) and the Galaxy S20 FE. From now on, both devices will also receive security updates every quarter. The Note 20 will actually receive updates until approximately August of this year. And support for the Galaxy S20 FE is expected to end sometime in the fall.
So if both models receive quarterly updates for at least a year from now on, the total support period for them will also be longer than originally promised. It is not yet possible to say at this time whether the total support period for the Note 20 and S20 FE will ultimately be five years.
Addition: because the S20 FE and Note 20 will still maintain their monthly update schedule, it is still difficult to speculate whether they will also receive a fifth ‘update year’. We write more about it here.
Not for the first time
It is not the first time that Samsung has offered such an extension of the support period without announcing it. In early 2019, a similar ‘update downgrade’ announced an extension of the support period of the 2016 Galaxy A5.
