As known, there were several security updates in the past for Android. However my Sony Xperia 10 II still running Android 11 with security patch level Oct. 05, 2022. The last official Android 11 update was released February 5, 2024.
How to update?
How to install the current Android 12, which is supported by Sony for this phone.
Hi,
I use Sailfish OS for a while. Started with a Sony X, then moved to XA2 and now X 10ii.
Why updating? It’s for security reasons and Android support is installed as an app in the Jolla Shop.
By the way: Using insecure apps is not a good idea.
@thigg, you correctly stated that only a few firmware partitions from “the android before you installed sfos” still exist after flashing SailfishOS: Hence there is absolutely no Android left over from “1.”!
Even more critical is this misconception, because it is a more common one, which already resulted in fundamental misunderstandings:
This is not Android at all: These are the Sony software binaries for AOSP! In the Microsoft Windows world these would be called “drivers”. So technically these are device drivers Sony creates for AOSP (Google’s Android Open Source Project), which SailfishOS is able to utilise.
Thus the only “Android” which may be installed when SailfishOS is installed on a device supported by Jolla is the compiled code from AOSP (“3.”), which is part of AlienDalvik aka AAS (Android AppSupport) and Waydroid (formerly Anbox). The correct term for these products is Android Runtime Environment; nowadays these are all for regular Linux distributions (as Ubuntu or SailfishOS), but AlienDalvik was also available for WindowsMobile and BlackberryOS 10 used an Android Runtime Environment (based on AOSP 4.3) on QNX.
Because this “Android” inseparable from the integration code of these products, it is not separately updatable. Theoretically one may manually update specific software-components by copying their files, but that is extremely error prone and may break the whole Android Runtime Environment.
TL;DR
There is no real Android installed when SailfishOS is installed, hence one cannot update “Android”.
As this was about the security patchlevel, all those components are still dependent on sonys android distribution(s) to receive security fixes. And some of those fixes can be passed on by sailfishos, others can’t (yet.)
Updating the stock sony firmware for a device does a ton of stuff, much of it not directly tied to android.
I guess that refers to “Android security backport source code”, in which case it would be from December 2023. This aligns with what it says in the AAS settings on 4.6 Sauna.