Another month has ended and for Asus it means another month without a firmware update for Zenfone Max Plus (M1) users. March 2019 was the third consecutive month without updates (after January 2019 and February 2019). This is especially worrying because the last two updates (in November 2018 and December 2018) completely rendered the Zenfone unusable. So many users are complaining on the official product forum but sadly the fix is not coming anytime soon as they are waiting since the unfortunate release in November 2018. In other words, the Zenfone Max Plus M1 is broken for 140 days now (if updated to Oreo).

Last month I was trying to speculate if the new version will come or not and whether it will be Android Oreo or Android Pie. There are still no new details available, but there are new promises on the official product forum that the developers are still working on the new firmware. To quote Selena_ASUS, which posted on April 2nd, 2019:

Team is work on new firmware,please be patient for new image update notification release on ASUS website.

Note that this exact copy/paste sentence was available on the forum before, so it doesn’t mean that the patience is rewarded.

The fact that there was no updates since December 14th, 2018, means that there was also no security patches included. The latest security patch from Google that is available on Zenfone Max Plus is more than 4 months old and quite outdated.

If you have decided to keep the Zenfone Max Plus M1 and not switch to other brands (some users in the forum claiming they have bought a new phone and are much happier with them than with M1), then there’s really not much left to do than to wait. Asus, your move.