PopOS is based on Ubuntu, so the Phased Updates answer above most likely explains what you’re seeing.

If you want to force the immediate upgrading of a given package that is being delayed by phased updates, you can apt install it. (However, note that this will also mark the package as manually installed if it wasn’t already, which means that if you later remove everything else that depended on it, it won’t join the list of “no longer needed” packages which get removed by apt autoremove).

Typically updates that are being phased should be relatively unimportant, but if you want to know what you’re missing you can also say apt changelog and apt policy (supplying a package name as an argument) to find out what has changed.

imo phased updates make sense, but ubuntu’s current implementation of them is terribly confusing for commandline users who aren’t aware of them.

edit: actually according to this and this PopOS disabled phased updates in their focal (20.04) branch back in March. Maybe they’ve come back in jammy (22.04)? Or maybe you actually have some other conflict causing packages to be held back.

The Ubuntu based distros may have this phased update thing. That AskUbuntu link has a command to override APT package manager to install the held-back packages.

Ubuntu tends to hold back system critical packages in case there are issues. Systems with certain install UUIDs will be ‘guinea pigs’ and install these packages before everyone else. You can override this behavior and disable phased updates on that particular computer.