The Android 4.3 Update for Galaxy Note 2 Is Ready for Roll out

Samsung has a few Android 4.3 upgrades prepared for this month, including the ones for Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy Note 2. The Note 2 upgrade is supposedly already ready for rollout, and some users have already gotten their hands on a build that is dated from October 31st. The Note 2 should see all of the changes that are coming to Galaxy S3 and Note 3, except for a few features that apparently remain exclusive to the Note 3.
I’ve seen quite a few OEM’s have tried to push Android 4.3 to their devices, and are just now getting around to do it, after KitKat has already been officially released, but I wish they were skipping 4.3 altogether, especially when it was such a minor update. It was smaller than even 4.2, it arrived late, and everyone knew we’d see the next version, just a few short months later.
It makes very little sense to switch to 4.3 under those conditions, especially if you plan on making 4.3 the last upgrade a lot of your customers are going to see on their phones. The only reason Google even released Android 4.3, and didn’t just wait for KitKat, was because they needed a “new version” of Android to arrive with the new Nexus 7. Granted, 4.3 did fix some issues that 4.2 brought, but again, it didn’t feel like a huge upgrade that everyone was dying to get.
Android 4.3 is likely not the last update the Note 2 will see, since it was released a year ago, and I have to assume Samsung wants at least its flagship devices to be supported for those “18 months” (which I think it should be more like 2 years anyway) that they promised as part of the Update Alliance. It will probably receive 4.4 or the one after 4.4. To keep their 18 months of updates promise, they’d have to upgrade to the version coming out at next Google I/O, too. We’ll have to see how that goes.