The first Monday of each new month is known in these parts as the day Google releases updates for Pixel phones. We’ve circled their dates over the years of Pixel phones and got the information up to speed with you as soon as it went live. After all, getting updates on our phone is one of the joys of life for a techie.

For the second month in a row, Google has skipped the Pixel update release schedule on the first Monday and kept quiet about the delay. While it’s not necessarily unheard of since Google will delay updates from time to time, the change to the Pixel update bulletin page makes us wonder if Google might be adjusting the schedule.

Until a couple of days ago, there was a note on the Pixel update bulletin page (now removed), which read as follows:

Important: Pixel update bulletins are published on the first Monday of the month unless that Monday falls on a public holiday. If the first Monday of the month is a holiday, the bulletins will be published on the following business day.

This was Google’s timeline confirmation that they are indeed aiming for the first Monday of every month to release new monthly Pixel fixes. As far as I can tell, they only added this note last June, so it hasn’t been there forever. However, if you go through the entire list of Pixel newsletters, you’ll see that Google has basically stuck to this first Monday schedule since at least October 2017. This is a famous chart.

The bulletins posted on this page are published alongside the general Android security bulletins and contain additional security fixes and functional improvements that Google ships to its Pixel phones. Speaking of the Android Security Bulletin page, it still includes a note similar to the one above, suggesting that Google is still releasing general Android patches on the first Monday of every month and doing so again in April 2023.

Android Security Bulletin

You might want to ask, “Who cares?” Well, for those of us who have had Pixel phones for years, we’re kind of used to getting a new update for our phones on the first Monday of every month. We can prepare our phones accordingly, rejoice at Android again if new features are included, and pray for bug fixes. We also love it when this random Reddit guy claims with every update that he’s noticing that the Pixel 6’s fingerprint scanner is magically faster. It’s not like that dude.

Unfortunately, since the release of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro in late 2021, Google has sometimes struggled to maintain its first Monday schedule. You can remember those first few difficult months of the Pixel 6, when Google left the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro in pretty rough shape after a buggy December update that wasn’t fixed until mid-January. They are also silent about a number of strange carrier delays involving T-Mobile in recent months, not counting late-March and April builds.

But if we focus on the March update as an example, there was a one-week delay first, followed by another one-week delay for most Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, and Pixel 6a devices in the wild. People on Verizon with the Pixel 6 also had to wait another week.

And here we are in April, and Google again met with silence. The only news or information we have about the April Pixel update comes from Verizon, but it doesn’t contain anything about the Pixel 6 or Pixel 7 lineups.

Silence is a big part of the problem here because we just don’t know what’s going on. When many of us bought Pixel phones, we did so knowing that we would receive monthly updates and that they would arrive within the first few days of the month. If Google no longer wants to comply with this strict schedule, that’s fine, but tell us what happened. We need to drop our expectations.