It seems Samsung is finally adopting Android seamless updates, users report

The seemingly eternal waiting for Samsung to implement so-called seamless Android updates might be finally over. As Android Authority reports, citing journalist Mishaal Rahman's post on X (formerly Twitter), the first owners of the new Samsung Galaxy A55 G5 in India are witnessing a behavior consistent with the behavior of the feature that Google announced along with Android 7.0 Nougat, back in 2016.

Per Rahman, this was observed by multiple Indian users and further confirmed by a separate report from The Mobile Indian.

The new mid-range Samsung Galaxy A55 5G was launched just a few days ago, and it seems to be the first Samsung smartphone to support the feature.

Samsung may have finally implemented seamless updates on their Android devices! When updating the new Galaxy A55 5G, users have noticed that the software update screen now shows a "downloading and installing" as well as "verification" steps.

In addition, @TheMobileIndian… pic.twitter.com/3Xk8iQZ3gz
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) March 21, 2024

Up until now, all Samsung phones used the old-fashioned way of installing updates. They asked the user to initialize the update and restart the device, locking the user out for a substantial amount of time until the installation process finishes.

Seamless updates, on the other hand, do all the hard work in the background. The update is downloaded, verified, and installed while the users keeps using the smartphone. Only then he is asked to reboot the device to finish the process.

The feature is also dubbed "A/B system updates" because there are two separate system partitions for this purpose. Most of the installation process is done on the inactive partition. As part of the reboot, the process is finished, and the system boots up from the previously inactive partition.

The downside is that a few extra gigabytes of storage must be reserved for the process. However, the growth of smartphones' internal storage capacity helped mitigate this issue somewhat.

While it is difficult to understand the hesitancy of Samsung to adopt the feature, we might know the reason why the phone maker changed its mind. Android Authority pointed toward a recent comment in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) hinting that the support for "classical" updates will be ditched. Therefore, Samsung might have been forced to step in, and the Galaxy A55 5G could be followed by more models soon.