Less than a week into December, Samsung is frantically releasing the December 2019 security patch to more and more devices. It has now added the Galaxy A7 (2017), A7 (2018), J7 Max/On Max, Galaxy J6+, and the Tab Active2 to this growing list. It’s encouraging to see the Korean company release the latest security update to its old non-flagship models as well.
Coming to regional availability, the update for the Galaxy A7 (2017) is currently available in Russia and Uzbekistan, while the 2018 variant is receiving it in Spain. The Galaxy J7 Max and Tab Active2, meanwhile, are getting the same update in India and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively. In contrast to these devices, the Galaxy J6+ is seeing a much wider December patch rollout with the update currently reaching users in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Romania, Ireland, Portugal, and a few other markets. However, it appears the J6+ update is limited to the Vodafone variant in most of these markets.
Going by Samsung’s monthly security bulletin, the December 2019 SMR (Security Maintenance Release) patches six critical and more than two dozen high and moderate-risk Android OS vulnerabilities, along with 13 Samsung-specific vulnerabilities. Considering these are all relatively old budget or mid-range devices, the update is unlikely to include any new features. If you come across any user-facing changes in the release, do let us know in the comments section.
Since Samsung rolls out updates in stages, not all eligible devices may receive the OTA update automatically at once. However, you can manually check and download the latest update by going into Settings and tapping the Download updates manually option under the Software Update menu. Alternatively, you can also consider downloading the newest firmware for your device from our database and manually flash it. You can find all the firmware for the Galaxy A7 (2017) here, A7 (2018) here, J7 Max/On Max here, Galaxy J6+ here, and the Tab Active2 here.
