So with no bug reports from the beta channel over the last few days, RC12 is going to start making its way to the main distribution production channel... starting with 5% of the users.
This is the first major non-testing production update in over a year, so the rollout is being done carefully-- slowly and incrementally.
If there are still no problems reported, RC12 will be expanded to more published users until 100% is reached.
Update Jan 3 -- No issues reported, so rolling out to 10% of users.
Update Jan 5 -- No issues or crashes reported... will roll out to 20% at end of day.
Update Jan 7-- Amazing-- there hasn't been a single crash report (yet). Maybe pushing our luck here, but if there are still no problems we'll will go to a 50% rollout! (Update to update: We're at 50%!)
Update Jan 12-- Although there are to-date no crash reports yet, there has been a single report of an issue in the review section on the Play Store. The person was invited to explain the problem further in the forum for more analysis, help, and hopefully a resolution, but so far no response. If they don't show up up in the next day or so, the assumption will be they resolved the problem themselves, and we'll move the rollout up to 100%, as this was the only report of any problem on any device so far.
Update Jan 13-- No further word from this one user. Thousands of people have already migrated to the new version without any reported crashes, so if nothing new is reported in the next few hours, we'll go to 100% tomorrow.
Update Jan 15-- It's been six days without any further response from the user, and zero other reports of bugs or crashes. So Time to go to 100%!!
Enjoy and Happy New Year!