TL;DR
- Android owners installing Google Play system updates noticed their software date rolling back to November from January.
- Google now characterizes the appearance of that November date as a “display-only” issue.
- Google is working to fix the update so it starts showing the correct date.
Software updates are supposed to be pretty straightforward, right? A new one comes out, we install it, and we’re running the latest and greatest code — until the next update arrives, anyway. But the path we’re walking is always supposed to be a forward one — version numbers get higher and higher, and release dates push further and further out. Right now, though, a whole lot of Android users are confused as their phones “update” from January 2026 to November 2025. And now Google is finally starting to explain what happened.
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