How long will my phone get security updates?

One question, four kinds of answer#

"How long will my phone get updates" reads like a single question with a number for an answer, and almost every article treats it that way: a table of manufacturers, a column of years, done. The table is the problem. The big makers do not publish the same kind of information, and flattening them into one column of years makes most of the answers wrong in a way that is impossible to see from the table itself.

There are four kinds of answer here. Some makers print the end date itself. One publishes a promise you can count from. One publishes a live status. One publishes nothing about duration whatsoever. A printed date needs no working out; a promise can be turned into a date; a live status tells you what is happening this month but not what happens next year; nothing at all can be turned into a date only by guessing. Those are not four values of the same variable. Knowing which kind of answer you are holding matters more than the number, because it tells you how much weight the number will bear.

Google: a promise, and the arithmetic to go with it#

Google is the clearest, and the most commonly misquoted. The seven-year figure is real, but it is not the whole Pixel line. Google's own policy page draws the boundary at the Pixel 8: that generation and everything after it gets seven years of OS, security and feature updates. The Pixel 6 and 7 generations and the original Pixel Fold get five. The Pixel 5a and everything older sits under a heading stating plainly that those models "no longer receive Android version updates and security updates". (Google's Pixel update policy)

The distinction matters to a large number of people. A Pixel 7 owner reading "Pixel phones get seven years" will assume support until 2029; the actual commitment runs five years from October 2022. Two years of imagined coverage is the difference between planning a replacement and being surprised by one.

What makes Google unusually checkable is that it publishes the other half of the sum too. A separate page lists the month each model first went on sale on the Google Store in the US, which is the date the window is counted from. (Google's device availability dates) With both pages you can compute an exact end date rather than estimate one, and you can see the calculation rather than trust it.

Motorola and OnePlus: the end date, printed, because the law says so#

The cleanest answers on this page come from the two makers that are usually left out of it, and the reason is legal rather than editorial. The UK's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure regulations require anyone selling a connectable product in Britain to state a defined support period for it. That turns a marketing question into a filing obligation, and the filings are public.

Motorola's are signed statements of compliance, one per model, each naming the handset and printing the window: a start month and an end month. A moto g53 5G says three years. An edge 40 says four, May 2023 to May 2027. There is no arithmetic to do and no generation boundary to get on the wrong side of. Motorola adds that the information is not a commitment and that it may change the timing of any release, which is a caveat worth reading rather than a reason to discount the date. (Motorola's UK PSTI statements)

OnePlus publishes a table with two columns, the product name and the end date of its support period, and nothing else. Its written pledge is a floor of three years for phones and tablets, but the table routinely runs well past that: the OnePlus 13 is listed to January 2031. The floor is not the forecast, and where the two disagree the table is the specific claim. OnePlus notes the page is for reference and that delivery can vary by region and model. (OnePlus's UK product security page)

There is a gap in the middle of this, and it is Xiaomi. Redmi and POCO are among the most widely carried phones on earth, and what Xiaomi publishes is that it will typically maintain security updates for at least two years after a model first ships. That is a floor with the word "typically" in front of it and no per-model dates behind it, which is why our checker shows Xiaomi's policy and refuses to print a date for a specific Redmi. Adding two years to a release date would look like an answer and would not be one.

Samsung: not a promise, a list of what is being patched#

Samsung takes a different approach, and it is the one least reported. Rather than leaning on a launch-day pledge, Samsung maintains a page listing which devices it is currently issuing security updates for, split by how often: monthly, or quarterly. Current flagships and foldables sit on the monthly list. Older flagships and most of the Galaxy A, M and F ranges sit on the quarterly one. (Samsung's security update scope)

That is a present-tense fact, which makes it both stronger and weaker than a promise. Stronger, because it describes what is actually happening to your phone this month rather than what was said about it at launch. Weaker, because Samsung notes the list changes as each device's support period expires, so it tells you nothing certain about next year.

This is the practical value hiding in Samsung's page. The move from monthly to quarterly is roughly the marker of a device's second half, and it is visible months or years before support actually ends. If your Galaxy has moved to the quarterly list, nothing is wrong and nothing needs doing today, but the useful thing to know is that the countdown has visibly started.

Samsung separately says it is extending security update support for Galaxy devices by up to seven years, from January 2024 onwards. It also states, in its own notes, that availability and timing vary by market, network provider and model, and that some carriers only support quarterly updates even for devices on the monthly list. That caveat is worth more than the headline number: it is the manufacturer telling you that a promise alone would not have told you what your particular handset gets.

Apple: the honest answer is that there isn't one#

Search for how long an iPhone receives updates and you will find confident figures, usually five, six or seven years. None of them come from Apple. Apple publishes a compatibility list, the models that run the current release, iOS 26, and makes no statement anywhere about how long any device will keep receiving updates. (Apple's iOS 26 compatibility list)

What those confident figures actually are is an average. Someone measured how long previous iPhones lasted before Apple dropped them, took the mean, and presented it as your phone's expiry date. As a description of Apple's past behaviour that is reasonable and probably roughly right. As a fact about the device in your pocket it is a guess, and it is presented in the same typeface as the sourced numbers on the same page, which is what makes it misleading rather than merely uncertain.

So the checkable question for an iPhone is narrower: what has Apple actually shipped to your model, and when? That has an answer, it is sourced, and it is less satisfying than a date. It is also the only part that is true.

One correction belongs here, because it is the thing most often got wrong: dropping off the newest iOS is not the end of support. Apple maintains security-only branches for older releases and patches them alongside the current one. On 11 May 2026 it shipped four sets of security updates on the same day, the oldest of them reaching an iPhone 6s that went on sale in September 2015. That is more than ten years of patches, and it is a record rather than an average. (How long does Apple support iPhones? goes through what Apple does and does not publish, and measures the elapsed support model by model.)

The clock starts at release, not at purchase#

This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it costs real money. Support windows are counted from the date the model first went on sale, not the day the box was opened. A phone launched three years ago has three years already spent, however new the handset is.

It matters most in exactly the situation where people feel cleverest: buying last year's flagship at a discount. Part of what makes it cheaper is the year of updates you are not getting. That can still be a good trade, and often is, but it should be a trade you made on purpose. The same applies to budget phones sold long after launch, which frequently have the shortest remaining window of anything on the shelf.

What actually happens when the updates stop#

Nothing, on the day. The phone works exactly as it did, which is why the end of support is so easy to ignore and why the advice to replace the device immediately reads as alarmist to the people hearing it. What changes is the shape of the risk. Until the last patch, flaws get found and then fixed; after it, flaws get found and stay open, permanently, on your device. The exposure accumulates rather than arriving, with no visible signal at any point.

In practice the forcing event is rarely a security incident. It is a banking app that stops opening. What happens when your phone stops getting security updates covers the order things change in, what actually reduces the exposure if you are keeping the phone anyway, and when it is genuinely time to stop using it.

How to check your own phone in under a minute#

1. Find your exact model. On Android: Settings, About phone. On iPhone: Settings, General, About. "Galaxy A15" and "Galaxy A15 5G" are different entries on Samsung's list.
2. Look it up against the manufacturer's own page rather than a roundup, or use our checker below, which reads from those pages. For a Motorola or a OnePlus, that page prints the end date outright.
3. Check what your phone has actually installed. Android: Settings, Security and privacy, System and security update. iPhone: Settings, General, Software Update.
4. If the security patch level shown is more than a few months old on a device that should be supported, the gap is usually your carrier or region rather than the manufacturer.