The Pocophone F1 will be updated to at least Android Q

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The Xiaomi Pocophone F1 is an interesting experiment for the company and I for one am curious to see how it pans out for them. Many have said they are taking the OnePlus approach by offering high-end specs at a respectable price. They are also being quite friendly to the developer community with a promise of only a 3-day wait for their bootloader unlock program. Which still shouldn’t even be needed, but it’s a lot better than having to wait over 2 months like some other Xiaomi devices. Some new information has come out about the smartphone from Xiaomi’s sub-brand as we’ve now been told that it will be updated to at least Android Q.

On their own, Xiaomi themselves has an interesting update policy that they follow. For the majority of the Android smartphone OEMs out there, the frequency of updates depends on how much the phone costs and how recently it was released. For example, a new flagship will get a lot of attention for the first few months as it receives security updates, bug fixes, etc. These high-end devices are normally also guaranteed at least two major Android version updates. The longer these phones are out in public the less frequent their security updates get (except for a few OEMs) and then once said phone receives its second big Android version update it is virtually retired.

Things are different when it comes to Xiaomi and their MIUI OEM ROM though. We’ll see devices that have been released many years ago continue to receive new MIUI updates. These MIUI updates for older phones aren’t coming with new versions of Android though, but many of them do get new features that have been backported to the older device. With the Pocophone F1, we’re in a bit of a gray area since it’s a new, experimental sub-brand for Xiaomi, so people have been wondering how updates will be handled.

We'll do at least P and Q — Jai Mani (@jaimani) October 28, 2018

A question was sent to Jai Mani, an ex-Google Play/Android employee who is now the head of product for Xiaomi’s Pocophone Global sub-brand. He was asked if the company would be committed to updating the Pocophone F1 with at least two major Android version updates and he did confirm this. The smartphone shipped with Android 8.1 Oreo but the man says that it will “at least” receive an update to both Android Pie and Android Q.