Early this morning, under the guise of a “Localization for English” update, some Windows 10 Insiders in the Fast Ring were instead surprised to find that their phones were installing a new build, version 14998. While Windows 10 Insider build 15002 for PCs had launched two days prior, there was no mention of a mobile build (although it had been well over a month), no blog post, and nothing to suggest that this was all supposed to be happening.
A few hours later, chief Windows Insider Dona Sarkar tweeted out that they were “investigating,” and our request for more information from Microsoft came back with the mother of all boilerplate PR responses, but still nothing concrete about what happened.
Since then, however, Sarkar has been responding to questions about the debacle on Twitter:
we were doing an internal experiment and accidentally targeted a group of external users. Flighting the flighting system!
— Dona Sarkar (@donasarkar) January 12, 2017
While the testing was inadvertent, at least for the external testers, Sarkar wasn’t ready to call it a “big accident.” Indeed, planned or not, the test worked!
Not really, targeted to a little group which is why most didn't see it. We know our experiment worked!
— Dona Sarkar (@donasarkar) January 12, 2017
As to what makes the group of us so special as to be included in the “little group,” Sarkar explained:
diff groups of selfhosters in-house mostly, like devs, IOT interested, holograms, etc.
— Dona Sarkar (@donasarkar) January 12, 2017
How the group of external testers got added to the test is as yet unclear, or why the update was labelled as a “localization,” but as we figured it was just a mistake, one that was getting us ready for the real news, the release of Windows 10 Mobile build 15007. Oh, and by the way, if you did install 14998, or if it’s ready to install on your device, don’t worry, 15007 will install over it just fine.
