It will take 24 hours for everyone to get their updates

Apr 20, 2015 14:47 GMT  ·  By

A fresh Ubuntu Touch update was made available just a few days ago, and it was received very well by the community, but Canonical also introduced a new feature called phased updates.

Now that Ubuntu phones are in the wild, Canonical is trying to make everything so that the experience of those users goes as smooth as possible. For example, it would be a bad day for a user to update his or her phone and discover that the update just caused some important problems to the phones. This is the main reason phased updates have been introduced, and they are not something new.

Canonical tests Ubuntu Touch in numerous ways and the developers always try to make sure that no breakages or regressions are introduced, but it's impossible to be 100% sure. With phased updates, there is a good chance someone will report breakages long before any real damage is done.

Phased updates are not something new

Google uses the same technique for its stock Android updates. They don't just land for everyone at once, it takes days and even weeks to reach out to everyone. Canonical doesn't have the same user base, so 24 hours is more than enough.

"This is a safety measure that gives us time to back-off the update in the very unlikely case of some critical issue getting reported - making sure not all devices suddenly go bad. Of course, we made sure that nothing like that can happen, but we prefer to be super safe. This also means that, even though, the OTA-3 got now released, not everyone will be able to update it instantly. The subset of devices is random based on the percentage value of each phase. But in the end, in about 24 hours, it should be already available to everyone everywhere," said Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak in an earlier email.

Canonical didn't really made a big deal out of this new feature, but if your friend gets a new update, and you didn't, at least you now know why that happened.