Samsung has released the December 2019 security update for the Galaxy A5 (2017), Galaxy J5 (2017), Galaxy A8 (2018), and Tab A 10.5 in select regions. The company has been rather quick so far in pushing the latest monthly patch to many of its devices, so much so that it kickstarted the rollout even before the same update is available for Google’s Pixel devices.
The update is probably limited to security fixes and unlikely to bring any new features to these non-flagship models. As usual, the December patch includes security fixes for dozens of vulnerabilities in the core Android OS and Samsung customizations on top of it. You can read our article based on Samsung’s monthly security bulletin to know more about the nature and severity of some of these risks.
The December update for the Galaxy A5 (2017) is rolling out widely in many regions such as Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Poland, Peru, Brazil, etc., while the Galaxy J5 (2017) is receiving the same on all the major carriers in South Korea. The Galaxy A8 (2018), meanwhile, is getting the update in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Canada, and Russia. Lastly, the release for the Galaxy Tab A 10.5 is currently out in Switzerland, Netherlands, Baltic, and United Kingdom.
If you own any of these devices and stay in these regions, you should be receiving the OTA update notification automatically. You can also manually check for it by going into Settings and tapping the Download updates manually option under the Software Update menu. Alternatively, you can also consider flashing the latest firmware manually. If you intend to do so, click here, here, here, and here to download the latest firmware for these devices.
