Samsung starts shipping Android 12L after a six-month wait

Google may have moved to Android 13 by now, but the biggest Android maker, Samsung, is only now starting to update devices to Android 12L. Android 12L came out in March, so Samsung’s update time is around six months.

Yesterday, the company announced Android 12L for the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3, which launched with Android 11 last year. Just before the weekend, Samsung announced Android 12L for its flagship tablet, and the Galaxy Tab S8 Series was the first to receive the update.

Both of these devices are great candidates for Android 12L as this release was mainly focused on large screen and foldable devices. A feature of the header is the bottom taskbar, which displays recent application icons, making it easy to switch between them. There are new split screen features such as the ability to view three apps at the same time, and you can easily launch split screen by dragging an app from the taskbar. There’s also a new split-bar notification bar.

Nothing has been announced about the Android 12L update for the flagship smartphone Samsung Galaxy S22. The S22 just received an update that increased the Samsung skin version number to be the same as those big screen Android 12L devices, so there’s a good chance the 12L will never make it to standard Samsung smartphones.

The introduction of Android 12L was a new Google strategy and it seems to have worked. Typically, releases on Pixel phones come out towards the end of the year, with the rest of the Android ecosystem slowly starting to roll out in the next calendar year. In Android 12L, Google split the Android development year into two parts: the release of 12L in March and the smaller release of Android 13 in August.

At the time, we wrote, “The 12L feature release gives Samsung and Lenovo the usual six-month period to get a new version of Android ready for the holidays.”That seems to be exactly what happened: Samsung’s August release of the Z Flip 4 and Z Fold 4 got the Android 12L feature, and those updates arrived just in time for the end of the year. If you can’t speed up updates to the Android ecosystem, it seems that halving the release and releasing code earlier is a working strategy to get key features to market faster.

Listing image from Samsung