There are two kinds of Android phone owners out there. We have the kind of people who eagerly take an update to the next Android version as soon as it’s available, and then we have the kind that will just ignore the update until it becomes too hard to ignore. There are an awful lot of people in the latter crowd, and if you don’t have a friend or relative who does this, then it’s probably you.Android’s distribution numbersare already bad enough because of uncommitted OEMs, and these people definitely drag the stats even lower. Good news, though — Google is coming up with ways to entice them into updating, and this latest one is looking great.
As revealed byMishaal Rahman on Twitter,Google is inviting OEMs to implement something called an Android Upgrade Invite. It’s basically a user flow that will showcase the best features of Google’s latest OS to those who have yet to update.
For example, if you’re on Android 12, an OEM might choose to push you an Upgrade Invite by showing you what you’re missing out on by not updating to Android 13 — essentially sweet-talking you to upgrade by advertising what you’re missing out on. This will, of course, depend on whether an OEM has actually released Android 13 for that specific device or not — after all, it’d be pointless to push one of these notifications to someone who can’t install Android 13.
If a device is using gOTA, or Google’s OTA service, the notification can be triggered automatically whenever a device detects that a major update is pending. Otherwise, it’s up to the OEM to manually push it to users. The user flow, which is part of the Google Play Services app, can also be customized by the OEM to re-style things to its third-party skin, or remove things that aren’t present in its brand of Android.
So if you soon get a notification nagging you about updating to Android 13, or in a few months telling you to update toAndroid 14, you now know the reason.
