Microsoft has just announced bad news for one of its foldable smartphones, the Surface Duo. The first iteration of the series will stop receiving updates, whether new versions of Android or simple security patches.
The Surface Duo has had quite an eventful life, to say the least. Microsoft’s first foldable smartphone was unveiled in 2019, before first hitting the market in 2020. However, we had to wait until the beginning of 2021 to see the smartphone arrive in Francefar too late for it to have a chance of finding a place on the market.
The device originally released with Android 10. The company said upfront that the Surface Duo would only receive three years of OS updates, but not everything ended up going as planned. In particular, we had to wait more than a year for Microsoft to deploy Android 11.
Android 12L will be the latest version of the OS on the Microsoft Surface Duo
The smartphone then received Android 12L, like several other foldable smartphones. However, this seems to be the last Android version that the device will enjoy. The company announced that the smartphone will no longer be supported, which means it won’t receive any more updates in the future.
The smartphone will not only not be entitled to new versions of Android, but also to no other security fixes. Microsoft is completely abandoning its smartphone, and it will therefore remain as is for the rest of its life.
However, several developers attempted to roll out Android 13 to the device, and even more unusual operating systems. Indeed, we had for example seen the French developer Gustave Monce trying to install Windows 11 on the device, but if it had the merit of working, it still had some problems.
In the future, only the more recent Surface Duo 2 will continue to benefit from certain updates. Officially, Microsoft announces that it will deploy new versions until October 21, 2024, after which the second generation foldable smartphone will also be discontinued. For the moment, it is not known when Microsoft will unveil a new iteration, but it seems that it will finally be entitled to a real foldable screen.