Microsoft in its latest blog post has revealed that no new build will be coming to either PC or Mobile before January nest year.
I also want to set expectations for new builds for both PC and mobile between now and the end of 2015. This time of year many of us take the opportunity to spend time with family and take some vacation time, so the engineering team will be running at a slower pace and many of our key people who drive our flighting process will be out (including me ) This means we won’t be releasing any new builds to Windows Insiders until January, for both PC and mobile.
But a shred of good news too. Microsoft may finally be making “Fast Ring” faster starting January after some false-starts.
One of the things that I have heard many times from Insiders in the Fast ring is that they want to see a faster pace of build availability. We’ve been considering how we want to respond to this feedback, and in January we expect to pick up the pace. To do this, we are re-evaluating the ring promotion criteria to allow more builds to reach Windows Insiders. The new criteria will be much closer to our criteria for flighting to our internal rings, which means more builds will pass it and be released externally to the Fast ring. This also means however that the builds we release to the Fast ring may include more bugs and other issues that could be slightly more painful for some people to live with. It’s a tradeoff – as the thing that throttles the rate of builds is the promotion criteria.
If you’re one of the many vocal Fast ring Insiders who’ve asked for this you’re probably excited right now. If you aren’t completely comfortable with this change then I encourage you to switch to the Slow ring to remain on more stable builds going forward. You can do this by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update > Advanced options and under “Get Insider Preview builds” moving the slider to the Slow ring. As always, we’ll listen to your feedback about this change and see how it goes so that we can learn and continue to evolve going forward.
