Some people have started receiving a notice about their Kobo ereader getting a new software update, but it appears to be a very minor update, and so far it’s only available for two models.
The software update version is 4.42.23296, and it’s only for the Kobo Clara Colour and the Clara BW. The update will install automatically at some point while syncing, but it might take a few weeks as Kobo generally rolls out updates slowly.
It’s been 8 months since Kobo last released a software update. Their updates have steadily become less frequent in recent years, and this update doesn’t appear to do anything worth talking about.
The release notes look like something Amazon would post. They just say “various bug fixes and stability improvements”. Kobo is usually more specific than that.
It’s weird how only the latest two Clara models would need bug fixes and stability improvements, but maybe an update is forthcoming for other Kobo models as well. One good thing about Kobo is they continue to keep most of their older models updated, even ones from over a decade ago. But they haven’t been adding some of the latest features to the previous gen models so that might be coming to an end soon as their software development has slowed to a crawl.
Pocket Update?
I saw that Kobo had released a software update and thought maybe they were getting ahead of the Pocket closure next month, but it doesn’t look like this update has anything to do with that. In fact, Kobo is still misleadingly advertising Pocket support for their ereaders on the product pages of their website.
However, Kobo has acknowledged the closer of Pocket on their support website. They don’t recommend any alternatives or make any promises about a possible solution on their end; there’s just a notice saying Mozilla is shutting down Pocket on July 8th, 2025, with a link to a support article about exporting saved Pocket content. Hopefully they’ll come up with something, but their recent lack of software development in general doesn’t inspire much confidence.
For some reason Amazon did not provide updates for 10th gen kindles. It still has one more year before they stop the updates. And the 2024 PW also did not get an update.
I don’t know what that has to do with this post, but Amazon does that sometimes. I’m sure those models will get updated again before long. The last update just changed the author name format so those models aren’t missing anything important yet anyway.
Just stating that Amazon is also not updating all their device.
I just had to search on my kindle pw se from just the last green whatever it was, and it was so slow. Handicapped and burdened with unnecessary garbage. It wasn’t like this when I got it, nor was the oasis it replaced. But these useless updates just grind it to a halt. Same library as my new kobo libra color. 2700 books all downloaded. Rebooted several times Ava left on and charged to self index. I just wanted to find and download an old book to transfer and convert. And it took so long, the search timed out and crashed. My kobo doesn’t have this problem. It finds everything i put on it. But the kindle crashes trying to search its own native index as that’s the device that gets the books i buy from amazon. No side loading.