Nearly eight years after the feature was announced, Samsung has finally embraced seamless updates, a feature Google announced in 2016 with Android Nougat. With this feature, users don’t have to stare blankly at the update screen and the update process feels much faster. It will take a few minutes for your phone to update. Unfortunately, this is not a feature that’s now available on all Samsung devices, and from what we’ve learned, it’s only limited to the newly launched Galaxy A55 5G smartphone.
Aside from sporting a slightly different design and using an Exynos processor compared to other Samsung smartphones, Samsung’s Galaxy A55 5G is also the first Samsung smartphone to offer seamless updates. First reported by The Mobile Indian, the feature appeared after installing the company’s March 2024 security patch on his Galaxy A55 5G unit. The software update there showed his two stages for installation, the first stage was “Download and Install” and the second stage was “Verification Stage”. After this, all I needed to do was restart the phone to complete the update process. Gadgets 360 was able to independently confirm this.
What is seamless update?
It’s been nearly eight years since Google introduced and adopted this feature. Seamless updates or A/B system updates have more benefits than drawbacks compared to regular updates and A/B system updates, but the overall emphasis is on convenience.
Seamless Update essentially allows users to use their device while software updates are installed in the background. This reduces the typical downtime that users face when phones without this feature are updated. This means that your phone will typically display an update screen with a progress bar, making calls, messaging, and other apps unavailable during the standard update process. While this isn’t a problem for small security patches, it can be time consuming for large software updates. Seamless updates, also known as A/B system updates, are not necessarily about speed, but about convenience. The update process is usually slow (as it happens in the background) and only requires a restart when the user has time to take a break.
How does seamless update work?
All this is possible thanks to A/B partitions. This means more space is required for seamless updates. However, it is also possible (starting with Android 8.0) to stream OTA updates to the B partition, eliminating the need to have a copy of the update before installation and requiring only space for metadata (only 100 kiB or 0.1 megabyte). It will be.
During the update process, new software updates are downloaded and installed on partition B, while partition A is busy running software that is currently available to users. Once the installation process is checked and completed on partition B, simply reboot your system and it will switch to partition B, making partition A inactive and ready for another update.
The advantage of the A/B process is that even if the update you just downloaded fails at some point, the system will reboot to partition A (older/current update) and your phone will reboot with the older software and continue as usual. is to continue working. Users will not damage their mobile phones. If a regular A-only system update fails to install, users also risk losing all their personal data (unless they have it backed up elsewhere).
Indeed, Samsung was one of the last major smartphone manufacturers to switch to seamless updates. Currently, Google’s him is supported by many brands such as Pixel, Motorola, Nokia (now HMD), OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Sony, and Xiaomi.
