How to Check If Your Phone Still Gets Security Updates

You can't tell whether a phone is still protected by looking at it — an end-of-life phone looks and feels identical to a supported one. The good news is that checking takes about two minutes, and this guide walks through it for both Android and iPhone, explains what the dates you find actually mean, and tells you what to do if your phone has already aged out.

What you're looking for

You want to know two things: which security patch level your phone is on (how recent the last fix was), and whether more patches are still coming. A phone stuck on a security patch from a year or two ago, with no new updates available, has almost certainly reached the end of its support.

On Android

Menu names vary a little by brand (Samsung, Pixel, Xiaomi and others each word it slightly differently), but the path is essentially the same:

1. Open Settings and tap Security & privacy (or Security, or System on some phones).
2. Look for Security update or Android security update. It will show a date — that's your current security patch level.
3. Tap it and choose Check for updates. If a new one appears, install it. If it's been many months and nothing ever appears, that's a strong sign support has ended.
4. To see your Android version, go to Settings → About phone → Android version.

A healthy, supported Android phone usually shows a security patch from within the last month or two. If yours is a year or more old and won't update, treat the phone as unprotected.

On iPhone

1. Open Settings → General → Software Update.
2. If an update is available, install it. If it says your software is up to date, that's good — but it doesn't tell you how much longer updates will keep coming.
3. Check which iOS version you're on under the same screen. If your iPhone is stuck on an iOS version that's two or more behind the latest and can't update, Apple has likely stopped supporting it.

Apple doesn't publish end-of-support dates, so “up to date” on an older iPhone can be ambiguous. For an estimate of how long a specific iPhone will keep getting updates, see our Apple update page, which explains Apple's roughly seven-year track record and five-year written minimum.

What the dates actually mean

Two dates get confused all the time:

• Security patch level is the date of the last fix your phone received. It tells you how current you are right now.
• End of support is the date the fixes stop— the one that defines the phone's real lifespan. Your settings screen shows you the first; it can't tell you the second.

That second date is exactly what we track. Rather than guessing from your patch level, you can look up any phone's end-of-support date directly.

Or just look it up here

If you'd rather skip the settings menus, search your phone on this site and you'll see its end-of-support date, how many months of safe use remain, and a Safe-to-Buy rating — no digging required. Browse by maker on the update tracker, or start from the Phone Finder if you want a recommendation rather than a lookup.

If your phone is already out of support

Don't panic, but do plan. An unsupported phone isn't safe for the long term, especially for banking and email. In the meantime: keep your apps updated, be cautious with links and downloads, and avoid using it for your most sensitive accounts. Then start looking at a replacement with a long runway ahead of it — our longest-supported phones and the best-phone rankings are the place to start, and the true cost of a cheap phone will help you avoid buying another short-lived one.

Why your phone says “up to date” when it isn't

This is the most confusing part of the whole process, and it catches almost everyone. Your phone reporting “your system is up to date” means only one thing: there is no update waiting for you right now. It does not mean the phone is still being supported.

A phone whose support ended two years ago will cheerfully report that it is up to date forever, because from its point of view it is — it has installed everything that was ever offered to it. The only way to tell the difference is to look at the security patch level date. If that date is more than about four months old on a phone that should still be in support, something is wrong. If it is more than a year old, the phone has almost certainly been dropped.

Reading the patch level correctly

The date shown as your Android security patch level is the date of the Google security bulletin your phone has incorporated — not the day the update installed. So a phone that downloaded an update last week may still show a patch level of several months ago, if the manufacturer was slow to integrate the fixes.

As a rough guide: within one month of the current date means you are on a well-maintained flagship; one to three months is normal for most mid-range phones on a quarterly cycle; more than six months means the phone is either very slow to receive patches or has quietly stopped receiving them. On iPhone there is no equivalent field — the iOS version number itself carries the information, and Apple lists which devices each release supports.

What to do if an update won't install

Updates fail for boring reasons far more often than interesting ones. Work through these in order.

• Free up storage.System updates need considerably more free space than the download size — often several gigabytes — because the phone unpacks and stages the update before applying it. This is the most common cause by a wide margin. See what to delete first.
• Charge above 50% and stay on Wi-Fi. Most phones refuse to begin a system update below a battery threshold, and many will not download a large update on mobile data.
• Wait for the staged rollout. Manufacturers release updates in waves over days or weeks. If a friend with the same phone already has it, yours is probably queued rather than broken.
• Check whether it is a carrier model. Carrier-branded phones receive updates after the carrier has approved them, which routinely adds weeks and occasionally means an update never arrives at all.

Setting it so you never have to think about this again

Turn on automatic updates and let the phone handle it. On Android the setting is under System → Software update → the settings gear; on iPhone it is Settings → General → Software Update → Automatic Updates, where you should enable both “Download iOS Updates” and “Install iOS Updates”, plus “Security Responses & System Files”.

There is a reasonable argument for delaying a major OS upgrade by a week or two to let early bugs surface, and our guide on installing updates on day one makes that case. That argument does not apply to security patches, which should always be installed immediately.