Update: An earlier version of this article confused the Android 4.3 update being pushed out to the Galaxy S4 on AT&T with the Galaxy S3 update being pushed out to international GS3 units.
If you have a Samsung Galaxy S III and receive a prompt telling you to update to Android 4.3, you might want to hold off on clicking the download button. According to SamMobile, nearly everyone who has updated their GS3 is experiencing WiFi issues, performance issues, terrible battery life, and hard locks that are so hard that the battery needs to be pulled. The update is so bad that it’s supposedly been pulled, and that if you check for updates on your GS3 right now, the phone will tell you that there aren’t any available.
To add insult to injury, AT&T began pushing out a 720 MB update to their customers that own a GS3 GS4. Judging by the comments left on Android Central, it appears that only a handful of people are having issues, specifically with WiFi. Maybe Samsung shipped a newer build to AT&T and purposefully gave international GS3 owners an earlier version just so they could be first?
The big question now is how will this impact the rollout of Android 4.3 for the Galaxy Note II. The second generation Note is, for all intents and purposes, a jumbo S3 with a few extra pen optimized applications installed. If Samsung needs to fix 4.3 for the S3, then that inherently means the same fixes will need to be done on the Note II.
Let’s not forget that Android 4.4 KitKat just launched. It’ll be a while until that hits devices, because … TouchWiz! But seriously, give it a few months.