In September, we saw tons of complaints from our readers about Samsung not bringing the September security patch to any of its devices. We still don't know if the security fixes for September were incorporated into the October patch (they most likely were), but Samsung decided to put the September patch on the back burner and instead focused on plugging the BlueBorne vulnerability on all its devices. But it seems the September security patch did make it to one device: The Galaxy S8 has it on the Android 8.0 Oreo beta.
The September patch does exist, but it's not exactly official
The Oreo beta doesn't just have the September patch – its security level is dated September 5, which means it incorporates the second set of exploit fixes that Google releases every month. These never make it to Samsung's version of the monthly updates, or they do but the company chooses to keep the first date of the month for the Android security level. Why does the Oreo beta have the September patch but not Nougat? We guess this is because Samsung compiled Oreo from the latest Android source code available at the time from Google, which is why the Oreo beta mentions the Android security patch date as September 5.
What does this mean? Well, it means nothing, really, but we thought it would be an interesting thing to tell our readers while they wait for Samsung to roll out the October patch to its 2017 flagships in most markets. It's been a slow rollout for the October security update, and for the Galaxy S8, we might see the Korean giant directly pushing out the November patch (which plugs a very serious exploit in the Wi-Fi standard). It could even wait until the official Oreo release is ready before it offers the latest security fixes to everyone; we will just have to wait and see.
