T-Mobile has officially begun the rollout of an over the air update to all owners of T-Mobile branded BlackBerry Priv devices on their network, which contains Google’s official Android Security Patch for January 2017. The patch brings fixes for a number of known vulnerabilities across Android versions, including privilege escalations in various apps, as well as kernel and driver security holes in blobs from various vendors like MediaTek, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA. The update does not contain any tweaks, fixes, or features aside from the January security patch. Since the update has no actual feature tweaks and only contains a patch that can be applied on top of the phone’s current software, it was able to be rolled out fairly quickly, and should be available for all branded BlackBerry Priv owners on T-Mobile right now.
The update going out has been available to owners of the unlocked BlackBerry Priv for a little while, in keeping with BlackBerry’s commitment to device security. AT&T has already released their January security patch for the BlackBerry Priv, so today’s update from T-Mobile means that Verizon is the last holdout leaving BlackBerry Priv owners waiting for the newest security fixes from Google. The carrier versions of patches typically come out only a week or two after the unlocked versions of the phone receive them, when it comes to the BlackBerry Priv, so users on Verizon likely don’t have too much longer to wait.The BlackBerry Priv, like BlackBerry’s newer DTEK50 and DTEK60 smartphones, keeps up fairly religiously with security patches, though many users are impatiently awaiting an update to Android 7.0 Nougat, an update that Nexus users got in late 2016. Thus far, BlackBerry and carriers have been fairly tight-lipped about exactly when the update will hit the BlackBerry Priv, but most speculation paints a pretty good picture of the possibility that the phone will get the update at some point. For now, it would seem that BlackBerry Priv owners will have to be satisfied with updates to BlackBerry’s suite of proprietary apps and features alongside speedy security patches that ensure that their devices stay just as secure as any Nexus or Pixel, despite the slightly older Android version.
[Source:-AH]
