A big reason for getting a Pixel phone is that you get major Android updates on release day. Android 11, which debuted last week, reached everyone right on time — well, not everyone really. Google stalled the update for a week in India as it still needed some fine-tuning ahead of a formal release. After a long and borderline excruciating wait, Android 11 is finally hitting Pixel phones in India.

Our tipster got the update weighing 1.72GB on their Pixel 4 XL in the day's wee hours. That’s around when one of Google’s community moderators also confirmed that the new firmware has indeed started to roll out in India. Google separately indicated the status change by removing the rollout exception for the country, marked with “All carriers except IN,” from its OTA image download page. The update is reaching all eligible Pixel models, even the ones that didn’t make an official debut here. In our tipster's case, for example, it’s an imported Pixel 4 XL unit that got the OTA.

After several users complained of not receiving the update in due time, Google came out with a statement clarifying that it needed to optimize a couple of things to suit “Indian ecosystem requirements” before kickstarting the rollout. That sounds about right as our tipster confirmed that their secondary Jio eSIM, which was previously good for only mobile data, can now also make calls and send SMS messages.

For your information, Indian Pixel owners who were running Android 11 beta got the stable build on day one; only those sticking to stable Android 10 had to wait all this while. We can now put this all behind us as all those counting the days until Android 11’s release in India have access to the new OS at last. Meanwhile, you can check out all the new features that this new version brings to your Pixel device.

Thanks: Puneet Singh