Chrome OS 80 has disappeared and we’re not sure why [UPDATE]

UPDATED: 3/2/2020 @ 3:20PM – Part of the fun of owning a Chromebook is the 6-week update schedule that both Chrome and Chrome OS enjoy. Not having to wait around for months for fixes to bugs and new features makes Chrome and Chrome OS feel more fresh than just about anything else out there. With each update, we routinely get new things to explore, new abilities by the OS, and new fixes to glaring issues.

We try to keep track on a lot of these upcoming changes as we experiment in the development channels of Chrome OS; both Beta and Developer. While it isn’t always the case, generally speaking, the Stable Channel is on whatever version is current, the Beta Channel is on the next version up, and the Developer Channel is one ahead of that. We’re weeks behind schedule on Chrome OS 80, so right now everyone is still sitting on Chrome OS 79 and you’d expect Beta to be on 80 and Dev to be on 81. But that’s not the case at all.

Instead, everyone else has moved on. If you take a look at the Omaha Proxy (this info is pulled from the server that keeps up with all the version of Chrome currently on offer), it becomes clear that all other systems are on the 80-81-82 schedule except for Chrome OS. But we aren’t behind on all of the channels. Instead, Stable is still on 79, Beta is on 81 and Dev is on 82. So where is Chrome OS 80?

That is a question we simply don’t have an answer to and, frankly, we’ve not seen this happen before. It’s not a huge deal to see things delayed a bit, but we’ve never seen everything else get updated and a version of Chrome OS simply disappear. There is an internal file we have access to that shows the versions of Chrome OS on a per-device level, and there are no Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, Chromebases, or tablets running Chrome OS 80 in any channel across the board. Something is clearly wrong.

The underlying issue is unclear at this point, but for Chrome OS 80 to be this delayed and no longer available in any channel is odd to be sure. We’ve reached out to a few sources and they are also a bit unclear as to what is happening, so we’ll continue to poke around and see if we can get an answer to the mystery behind the disappearance of the latest version of the OS. Unless things get corrected soon, my guess is we may end up just jumping to Chrome OS 81 as the desktop version is set to release in just two weeks from now. Generally, Chrome OS is about a week behind that schedule, so even if Chrome OS 80 rolled out today, they wold need to ready an update in 3 weeks. Perhaps for the first time in history, Chrome OS will simply skip a version. Stay tuned for more.

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