Chrome OS users accidentally receive software end-of-life warning

If you use Google’s Chrome operating system, you may or may not have gone into a state of panic recently after seeing a notification warning you that your Chromebook is about to receive its final update.

Thankfully, this isn’t the case and we now know that incorrect notifications have been sent out because of a bug in two of Chrome OS update channels.

Much like the browser, Chrome OS has four different update channels – Stable, Beta, Dev and Canary. Chromebook users can opt to receive updates from any of these channels, although each one after ‘Stable’, increases instability in the system and can cause issues like broken features and crashing. It does, however, give users faster access to the latest updates.

All Chromebooks do have an ‘expiry date’ of sorts, but most have at least five years in them before the dreaded final update siren starts going off. However, anyone currently using the Dev or Canary channels for updates may have seen this somewhat alarming message, as a bug in the most recent version of Chrome OS wrongly triggered these alerts.

Thankfully, the faulty code causing the bug has now been fixed and unless your Chromebook is quite old, and really is hurtling towards expiration, the notification should disappear soon.

For those on Canary, this should happen within the next couple of days due to the super speedy updates. However, the Dev channel typically updates only every week or so, meaning some will have to wait a bit longer before the pesky warning sign goes away.

While this might only be a minor inconvenience for some, it does highlight the risks of using an unstable OS update channel; one needs to balance rapid access to the latest features in Chrome OS against potentially unstable software.

If you’re still worried about losing important updates and are not sure when your laptop is due its final one, Google has very kindly produced a full support document with the expiry dates of every Chrome OS device ever created.