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.
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).