The folks from Google announced that Android 5.0 Lollipop would be the largest change we’ve seen for any Android operating system since the jump up to Gingerbread. While that might be true, it hasn’t come without its problems for a great deal of consumers.
Android 5.0 Lollipop comes with heaps of features including new martial design user interface, the ability to pick tasks up where you left off, tap and go NFC payments, multiple device support, important camera updates including UHD 4K video playback, battery saver mode, smart notifications and a smoother ROM. Unfortunately, when we have new features we also get bugs. It goes without saying that when we apply lots of features, we are likely going to find many bugs that need addressing in future over the air updates.
That’s where Android 5.0.1 comes in to play. We already saw the Mountain View company release 5.0.1 for addressing known bugs and improving the performance. Android 5.0.2 Lollipop was meant to do the same. However, according to reports, the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 and the Nexus 10 might not see the latest version of Android at all.
The Android 4.0 KitKat release last year saw minor updates for the 4.4.1 update and the 4.4.2 brought in lots of goodies including wireless printing, white status bar, white navigation bar, full screen album art on the lock screen, new emoji, immersive mode and more. That’s partly why we were expecting 5.0.2 to come with great features over the existing Lollipop, as well as address many known bugs for users.
While Google are not confirming or denying any reports, the latest news suggests that they could be skipping the OTA for the devices we mentioned earlier. The first-generation Nexus 7 tablet (2012) found 5.0.2 rolling out to consumers late last year during 2014. However, since then they haven’t rolled out anything for any of the other smartphones or tablets in the Nexus range. Since the update wasn’t successful for many users, the obvious take away here is that the developers are still not happy with the results they are getting from the testing; thus they aren’t confident enough to issue the official software update.
To give you an idea of the kind of problems people are facing, we note from all of our comments and from other sources around the web. The results are as follows: severe battery draining problems for some owners using the Nexus 5, WiFi problems on the Google Nexus 4, third-party applications causing conflicts with the camera, books from Kindle applications displaying no text.
Interestingly, some users are already reporting that they are finding the 5.0.2 OTA for the 2013 edition of the Nexus 7. However, those people only amount to a tiny number of users. Further complaints suggest that some owners are still running 4.4.X KitKat because they have not seen any official over the air system update message arriving to their notification panels.