Confirmed: Android 16 is coming sooner than we thought

We only just got Android 15, but rather than having to wait until late 2025 for Android 16, Google has confirmed that its next major software release will land in the second quarter of 2025 – so somewhere between April and June.

The company revealed as much on its Android Developers blog, claiming that it’s releasing Android 16 earlier than usual so that more devices can get the latest Android release earlier.

In other words, phones like the Samsung Galaxy S25, for example, will probably get Android 16 within a few months of launch, rather than having to wait six months or more. The likes of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, and Google Pixel 10 will surely ship with Android 16, too.

Interestingly, Google says that there will also be a “minor” Android release in the final three months of 2025. This will include feature updates, optimizations, and bug fixes, but won’t include any app-impacting behavior changes.

The company hasn’t actually named either of these updates, but as the only “major” Android release in 2025, the first of these will surely be Android 16, while the second sounds like it might be Android 16.1.

On top of that, we’ll see “incremental updates” in the first and third quarters of 2025.

Smaller updates, more often

With most of the highest profile Android phones landing in the first half of the year, it makes sense to launch new versions of Android at around the same time or shortly after, but this change does mean that Google will have less time to develop Android 16 than it's typically allowed for.

That, in turn, might mean that this is a smaller update than we've seen from previous years, though that’s just speculation for now. And even if it is, the release of Android 16.1 (or whatever it ends up being called) later in the year should bring additional changes.

So, if Google sticks with this approach in future years, it could simply mean that there’s a more regular drip-feed of Android improvements throughout each year, rather than a single massive overhaul once a year. We're certainly on board with that approach.

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