We announced at launch that the Xperia 10 VI would receive three Android OS upgrades. However, after a detailed technical assessment, we determined that due to limitations related to the device’s storage configuration, the Xperia 10 VI does not support an Android 17 upgrade experience that we consider adequate. Accordingly, we have decided not to make this upgrade available.
The size of the storage isn’t all - it is partitioned so that there is one partition for user data and two partitions for the operating system (+ a lot more, but they’re not important for this explanation).
Android updates work by updating the “inactive” system partition, setting it as active and rebooting. If the updated system fails to boot a few times, the bootloader will automatically switch back to the known-working older system and the update will be rejected.
These partitions can be resized, but I assume Sony did something stupid like have the OS assume an exact partition size (for example to check that the system is not tampered with), and something would break if the old OS rebooted with the resized partitions.
Hell, maybe the encryption used doesn’t allow them to resize the user data permission without losing all data in it - if the OS doesn’t fit then they literally don’t have enough space without forcing a factory reset.
None of this is to say that it’s not Sony’s fault - it is.
But those sound like software problems? Like, yeah, probably pretty tricky, but, it’s their source code, so, figure it out?
I guess forcing a factory reset is pretty rough, but, at least give the option.
It’s crazy to me that it’s considered acceptable to just… not do anything.
Well, it’s more acceptable than offering an update that is known to effectively brick the device if it fails. This device is fucked by poor planning - just avoid Sony in the future, because this is unlikely to change with future devices.
Again, the issue wouldn’t be that it’s hard to make the new system image work, it would be that the old one will be broken, so if anything goes wrong, it will not be available as a fallback. I think this even goes against Google’s requirements for Android - you can prevent the user from booting the older versions after an update, but the updated system must first be confirmed to be working (so the right way to do this is to boot into the new OS, and have it do the compatibility-breaking change - but this order is not possible if Sony doesn’t have enough space in the system partition for the new OS).