Update 1 (3/7/19 @ 2:10 PM ET): The update has rolled out to users in India, and members of our forum have grabbed the OTA files that you can sideload.

Recently news has excited a lot of ASUS smartphone fans as the company announced their plan to upgrade devices to Android Pie. It was just this week when the company published a list of over a dozen different devices that they are currently planning to update. This seemed to be a long term plan as their announcement simply gave a vague date of 2019 for these updates. However, the company has gotten to the point where they are ready to announce the open beta Android Pie update for the ZenFone Max Pro M1.

The company's ZenFone Max Pro series is quite popular among ASUS fans with the ZenFone M1 being released in May of last year. The ZB631KL variant of the ZenFone Max Pro series (also known as the ZenFone Max Pro M2) came out just a few months ago and ASUS has already begun its Android Pie open beta in India. In the list we published earlier this week, we saw both versions of the ZenFone Max Pro M2 (ZB631KL / ZB630KL) and ZenFone Max Pro M1 (ZB602KL) / ZB601KL).

ASUS ZenFone Max Pro M1 XDA Forum

I enjoy seeing these OEMs reaching out to the community to help beta test new updates. Not only does it put less pressure on the QA department but it also allows the company to collect more data than they could collect in a short amount of time. This also helps to squash those nasty widespread bugs before the official update would begin to roll out. As mentioned, this is an open beta so all you have to do is opt into the program for a chance to try out the new software.

You'll find the beta form in the link here, but you must meet the following criteria to be eligible:

  • Owning a ZenFone Max Pro M1 is crucial
  • Willing to provide information including IMEI, Serial Number(SN), Current Firmware for the beta test setting
  • Be familiar with Android operating system
  • Be able to read and provide feedback in English

Update: Rolling out, OTA files available

Thanks to XDA Recognized Contributor althafvly, you can now download the OTA firmware files from this thread. The files have been rehosted to multiple mirrors. You must be on Android 8.1 Oreo with software build xx.340 to use these files.