BlackBerry Priv to get Marshmallow update in May

Yesterday, BlackBerry announced its quarterly performance earnings which may have surprised some. Despite the positive potential powering the Priv, it ultimately appears the device failed to ignite consumers. Be it the high price, the aggressive competition, or the questionable long-term prospects of the OEM itself, the company ultimately sold fewer total devices than it had in the previous quarter though a breakdown indicating specific Priv sales numbers was not given.

In a bit of more positive news however, the earnings event also brought forth information that BlackBerry plans to release the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for Priv owners next month. Several devices have already been spotted in the wild running the latest stable version of Google’s mobile OS, and now there is evidence to suggest that a formal beta program might even be in the works:

Suffice to say, those who own the Priv are seemingly only a few weeks away from getting all the sticky goodness of the latest tasty treat.

About time

While BlackBerry had indicated last year that Marshmallow would see a delayed update process – Google released the OS version in October – the fact that it will not hit devices until May might irk some users. All the more so given that a more recent report had suggested Q1 as a target. Next month will be over half a year since the OS itself was made formally available to the public, and will be roughly six months from the release of the Priv itself last November. For a company that has launched a brand new device for a brand new platform, getting as many things right from the start would seemingly be of the most pressing concern.

It is likely that, due to the modifications BlackBerry has made to Android – BlackBerry Hub, for example – additional time and resources were needed to ensure Marshmallow ran properly with the skinned software. Still, with Android N now having been released for developers to tinker with and a formal roll-out likely to come just weeks after the Priv gets Marshmallow, BlackBerry clearly has its work cut out for it.