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If you've got an unlocked/international version of HTC's One M8, you might be wondering when your next Android update is coming. According to HTC Vice President of Management Mo Versi, the answer is "late next week." The company is planning an update to Android 4.4.3.
Dedicated Android fans will probably be a little disappointed that the latest update to HTC's One M8 flagship on Sprint doesn't include the bleeding edge 4.4.4. But it's pretty close, 4.4.3, and Sprint has thrown in a couple of notable expansions specifically for its network. In addition to the small back-end improvements in 4.4.3, the 2.16.651.4 release adds the Wi-Fi Calling feature that Sprint has been slowly rolling out for the last few months.
The 2013 Nexus 7 LTE, now known as the bastard child of the living Nexus family, has not received any updates in the recent round of Android 4.4.3, and subsequently 4.4.4, releases. All of a sudden just now, the 4.4.3 factory image finally showed up, and we can only speculate how long it'll be before we see 4.4.4. For those who are counting, that's 22 days since the Nexus 4, 5, Wi-Fi 7, and 10 have all had their respective factory images available.
Android 4.4.3 hit Nexus devices last week, and now the Paranoid Android folks are hard at work packing the latest version of KitKat into their custom ROM. Today they're ready to show off the fruits of their labor in the form of the first release candidate for Paranoid Android 4.4.
Android 4.4.3 isn't a huge bump up from the previous incremental release - the biggest change is a new dialer, though there are thousands of adjustments behind the scenes. Even so, the most popular families of custom Android ROMs are quickly adopting the open source code into their bleeding-edge releases. CyanogenMod has already begun the transfer to 4.4.3 with its latest nightly builds.
Holy crap, that was fast. According to a flood of tips we just received, at least some owners of Google Play Edition devices are now seeing updates to over-the-air Android 4.4.3. The latest incremental update to KitKat was just published yesterday - some Nexus devices don't even have it. At the time of writing (Tuesday afternoon US) we've been told that the Google Play Editions of the HTC One M7 (2013 model) and the Galaxy S4 are receiving over-the-air updates.
Ask anybody that spends time in the security circles and they'll tell you that every large software project is bound to have a few long-standing vulnerabilities in the code. Fortunately, there are usually a few people who are paid to close up those holes so you, the customer, don't find yourself the victim of nefarious evildoers someday. Like so many before it, the latest update to Android came with a boatload of changes, at least one of which fixes a potentially dangerous vulnerability that can be used for numerous attacks, including a way to acquire root.
Unless you blacked out all of the news from yesterday to avoid a deluge of stories about what has been happening in Cupertino, you probably caught wind that there's a brand new update to Android. Whether you're manually installing the latest OTA or going all out with the factory images, you might be interested to know what is actually different. Thanks to Al Sutton, we've got a brand new changelog compiled from the list of code commits submitted to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It covers just the bug fixes, tweaks, and adjustments from 4.4.2 (KOT49H) through to 4.4.3 (KTU84L). With 7,454 total changes, this update is a monster!
Yesterday was a relatively big day for Android, at least compared to our regularly scheduled programming - Google sent us a gift in the form of the 4.4.3 update, available immediately via factory images and in AOSP. The problem with factory images, however, is that they require an unlocked bootloader to flash, so many of you opt in to wait for the respective OTAs.
So. Sprint. About that KitKat 4.4.3 update you mentioned for the Nexus 5. You haven't seen it lying around anywhere, have you? Because we certainly haven't. And neither have any of our readers.
Several weeks ago, we caught wind of Android 4.4.3 and some of the changes it could bring, consisting mostly of bug fixes, both big and small. At this point, according to several sources familiar with the matter, Android 4.4.3 has entered internal testing outside of the core Android team - a process otherwise known as dogfooding. The final release isn't expected to hit public devices for a number of weeks, so those of you expecting it any day now will have to wait just a bit longer.
In the last several weeks, word of an upcoming Android 4.4.3 release started spreading around, for the most part based on sightings of new build numbers in server logs and bug reports, along with this tip by @LlabTooFeR. Of course, with so many 4.4.3 mentions, it's no surprise that these are actually legitimate and not creations of random trolls.