Google has been changing the usual cycle of Android updates and releases since Android 15. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the introduction of quarterly releases, a switch from the brief Developer Preview releases to year-long Canary releases, the reduction to twice-yearly AOSP source code releases, and the addition of a minor SDK release mid-cycle.
It’s all very messy. Even someone like me, whose job is to follow Android, kept getting confused by all the overlapping update cycles and feature releases. So I dug in and tried to make sense of the madness. The result is this single graph that visualizes and summarizes Android’s current, not-so-straightforward update state. Keep reading below the graph for the full explanation of what each release means and what you can expect from it.
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