NVIDIA’s SHIELD TV won’t get an Android 10 update, but you won’t miss out on much

NVIDIA’s SHIELD TV is often cited as one of the best Android TV boxes out there, and for good reasons. Not only it offers powerful hardware, but it also keeps getting better with new features and additions regularly being delivered via software updates.  Since the device launched with Android TV 9 running out of the box, many users were waiting for Android TV 10 update. But it looks like the Android TV 10 update isn’t on the cards.

An NVIDIA staff member has officially confirmed (via Twitter user @mrjuzmafia) in a forum post that they have decided to skip Android 10 for the SHIELD TV. However, the company reiterated that it still has a lot of things planned for the device.

Here’s the full statement from NVIDIA:

SHIELD development is still full steam ahead, we just had a release not too long ago. Android 10 was a no-op for Android TV, so we decided to skip it as the effort was large, and there was essentially no impact to end users other than the version string changing. Behond that, we don’t talk about our Roadmap ahead of time anymore, but I can tell you there is still a lot of development going into SHIELD.

It’s worth noting that OS updates aren’t as important for Android TV devices as they’re for smartphones. This is because the Android TV platform rarely gets major features through an OS update. Instead, many new features are delivered through system apps like the Android TV launcher. For example, the SHIELD TV recently received a new Discover feature which displays personalized content recommendations on the home screen based on your watching activity.

While this news may disappoint some users, we have heard murmurs that NVIDIA plans to skip Android 10 in favor of Android 11. We’re also hoping that NVIDIA upgrades the SHIELD to Android TV 12 as it adds support for a native 4K resolution UI and refresh rate switching. Although the SHIED TV does have its own refresh rate switching feature, it will be nice to have official OS-level support so that apps can take advantage of it.

For now, the NVIDIA SHIELD TV remains stuck on Android TV 9. We’ll let you know if we hear anything about the Android TV 11 update from the company.

The post NVIDIA’s SHIELD TV won’t get an Android 10 update, but you won’t miss out on much appeared first on xda-developers.

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