I just finished reading an article regarding the release of XE17 where the author was confused as to why there was a full version jump for such a very small update. Seeing as how Glass is one of the only products that doesn’t follow the typical software version numbering scheme, which I’m certain will change at the time of a consumer release of course, this is somewhat understandable but I still felt that I should try my hand at explaining it.

The “XExx.x” naming scheme for Glass updates, with “XE” standing for “eXplorer Edition”, is actually based solely upon the month the update was released. XE4 was released in April of 2013 and the main version number has incremented with each calendar month since then. So even though XE17 is only a very small update to fix a reboot issue that some Explorers are experiencing, it’s still jumps from XE16.2 to XE17 because it is the first update to be released in May 2014.

Past the main “XExx“ version number the updates do start following more standard version numbering, as was seen in April with the XE16 -> XE16.1 -> XE16.11 -> 16.2 releases.

If a calendar month is skipped then the corresponding “XExx” version number will also be skipped, as was seen when there were no updates between XE12 in December 2013 and XE16 in April 2014.