Today Adobe announced a change to the release date of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source versions. The new release date for this version, along with the patches 2.4.3-p2 and 2.3.7-p3, will be the 12th of April.
According to the earlier information, the new versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source will be released in March 2022, but now the release has been postponed. The team says that it should allow them to ensure that the release delivers the highest standards of security and quality. Also, they emphasized that the upgrade should be performed as soon as 2.4.4 becomes publicly available.
The pre-release will become available two weeks earlier - on the 29th of March. This will let the developers evaluate the possible issues during the upgrade before the general availability.
The new version, 2.4.4, contains a lot of improvements, including support of PHP 8.1. This might make migration more difficult, especially for highly-customized stores with loads of third-party plugins.