Google confirms Chrome OS 86 is on the way for the rest of us by week’s end

Since Chrome OS 86 began it’s arrival 15 days ago, it’s been quite clear that this update wasn’t going to show up like the last few that preceded it. About a week after the initial update date, we noticed quite a few of the devices we have around the office had yet to update. From comment sections and emails, it became clear that Chrome OS 86 wasn’t rolling out in one fell swoop as we’d expected, so we began searching for answers.

Two weeks after the original update began showing up, we began drawing conclusions based on the cross-updates-serving tool that can be found in a few places (cros.tech is our favorite) showing that even after 14 days, there were still quite a few devices yet to get updated to Chrome OS 86. We had reached out to Google for answers, and now we have them.

On schedule across the board

According to a representative from Google, Chrome OS 86 is rolling out to all Chromebooks by the end of this week and all users should receive the update by that point. Sure, Chrome OS 86 was scheduled for arrival on October 13th and some devices saw it that day, but Google’s official Chrome Updates blog wasn’t reflective of this change until October 22nd and our representative states that things are moving according to schedule and there are no delays and no pauses happening.

We didn’t get an official answer on why this update took over two weeks to roll out, but Google made it clear to us that it was not due to an issue in the update or any sort of problems in Chrome OS. What they did clarify was the fact that the cross-updates-serving tools that are out there have a bug that is causing them to report versions of Chrome OS across the board in an inconsistent and incorrect way. For instance, we’re getting reports of users who have devices that show as being on Chrome OS 85 in the cros.tech database, yet are clearly getting the Chrome OS 86 update.

As it turns out, this was all a bit of unfortunate coincidence. Chrome OS arrived a bit slower across the board than we originally expected, and the place we normally look to track update progress was/is buggy and made it appear that the update had stalled. While I don’t love Chromebooks taking two and a half weeks to get updated on an update schedule that is only six weeks long, I’m glad this is all sorted at this point and by week’s end, we’ll all happily be on Chrome OS 86.

In the end, it feels a tad silly to get bent out of shape about an OS update being two weeks late when compared with the sluggish pace that other devices – like Android phones – have to endure on a regular basis. With Google being right on top of updates since the spring, it simply felt out of sorts for the latest update not to be available to everyone within a day or so. Perhaps we’ll go back to a bit more of a staggered update roll-out from this point forward or maybe this update was just an oddball. Either way, we can stop discussing the schedule of Chrome OS 86 in just a few days and keep digging in to all the fun things this latest update brought along with it.