For Android OEMs building on AOSP, firmware delivery has always been a logistical challenge: it’s costly, manual update management is risky, and patching field devices at scale is harder than ever. Most try to do anyway — or they defer updates entirely, which is worse. Today, we’re announcing Esper Airwave, a fully managed OTA platform that handles the entire update lifecycle, from package delivery to rollback, without requiring your engineering team to build or maintain the delivery layer.

The Problems with OTA Updates at Scale

Android OEMs and their customers face mounting pressure to keep devices secure and up to date. Yet most organizations lack reliable OTA infrastructure, leading to three major challenges:

1. Security risks compound quietly

Android 8 hit the OEM-support cliff years ago, and your enterprise customers are still running it in production. Without automated OTA, patches take months to reach devices in the field, if they reach them at all. For OEMs selling into healthcare, logistics, or payments, that's not a technical debt problem. It's a compliance and sales problem. Enterprise RFPs now routinely require documented patch management. Unpatched fleets lose deals.

2. Building OTA infrastructure is expensive

A production-grade OTA pipeline requires scalable infrastructure, CDN distribution, cryptographic signing, rollout and rollback logic, and someone to maintain all of it. For most OEMs, that's a team and a multi-quarter project. The output is infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your product — it just keeps the lights on.

3. Version fragmentation kills support efficiency

Manual update processes produce mixed firmware baselines across device cohorts. Your support team ends up debugging issues that are version-specific, not product bugs. Every escalation that traces back to firmware drift is time your engineers spend on ops instead of roadmap.

The Solution: Introducing Esper Airwave

Esper Airwave is purpose-built for Android OEMs who need reliable firmware delivery without building the delivery layer themselves. It works with any AOSP build, requires no MDM enrollment, and handles the full OTA lifecycle — upload, staging, rollout, observability, rollback — from a single platform.

Patches ship in hours, not months

Airwave reduces deployment time from weeks to hours. Upload a full OS build or a delta package, configure your rollout strategy, and Esper handles delivery to every device in your fleet — globally, with real-time status per device.

Staged rollouts with automatic rollback

Airwave supports phased deployment: start at 1%, validate, expand. If failure rates exceed your defined threshold, the rollout halts automatically. For A/B partition devices, failed updates roll back at the OS level before the device ever reboots into a broken state. You set the policy; Airwave enforces it.

No servers to build or maintain

Esper provides the infrastructure — cloud storage, CDN, cryptographic signing, rollback logic. You bring the firmware package. There's no backend to stand up, no ongoing maintenance cost, and no engineering headcount devoted to keeping OTA operational.

What Airwave Does

Airwave gives Android OEMs the toolkit they need to deploy secure, reliable OTA at scale:

• Add New Device Models: Register and manage multiple device lines with ease.‍
• Device Registration: Track devices as they come online to ensure OTA coverage from day one.‍
• Upload & Deploy Full OS Build: Deliver complete build updates for major firmware releases.‍
• Upload & Deploy Delta Builds: Push lightweight updates for patches and incremental improvements.
• OTA Observability: Monitor rollout progress, device status, and update success in real time.‍

Works with Any MDM (or No MDM)

You don't need to change your device management strategy to get OTA capability. Esper Airwave works independently — whether you're using Esper, VMware, Microsoft Intune, SOTI, another MDM vendor, or no device management at all. What this means:

• Deploy firmware updates without MDM enrollment
• Keep your existing MDM vendor (or choose not to use one)
• No vendor lock-in — Airwave is just OTA, nothing more

Getting Started With Esper Airwave

• Step 1: Contact Esper. Reach out to discuss your device fleet, update requirements, and use case.
• Step 2: Proof of Concept. Deploy Airwave to a small test group (50-100 devices) to validate capabilities.
• Step 3: Integration. Configure your device models, upload firmware packages, set up deployment policies.
• Step 4: Scale to Production. Roll out to full device fleet with staged deployment for safety.
• Ongoing: Deploy security patches, bug fixes, and feature updates as needed through Airwave platform.

OTA, Simplified for Android OEMs

Esper Airwave removes one of the biggest barriers to delivering secure Android devices at scale. Instead of building and maintaining complex infrastructure, OEMs can focus on what matters most: innovating their device ecosystem and delivering value to customers.

Airwave provides the reliability, scalability, and security modern fleets demand, while giving OEMs the control and visibility they need to ship updates with confidence.

Get a 50-device test cohort ready to go. Contact us, we’ll get your firmware package, and show you what Airwave can do.