We heard a rumor a few weeks back that the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra would be the first flagship Samsung phones to support Android's seamless updates feature. The folks over at Android Authority are now corroborating that rumor in a new report.
The publication claims to have access to some leaked files from the Galaxy S25 Ultra that confirm support for seamless updates. Not that it's surprising. Eight years after Google introduced the feature, Samsung finally implemented seamless updates on a Galaxy smartphone this year, and it was only a matter of time until we saw it being implemented on more Galaxy devices.
Eight years after their introduction, seamless updates are coming to Samsung flagships
Devices that support seamless updates, or A/B updates, feature two system partitions. The operating system is installed on both partitions but only boots from one of them while using the other as a backup partition.
When a new software update is available, it is installed to the backup partition. The device then boots from that backup partition with the updated software upon restart. The two system partitions are essentially switched upon reboot, a process that is repeated with every software update.
Since the device runs from one partition and the update is installed on the other, it allows updates to be installed in the background. Regular (non-seamless) updates, on the other hand, reboot the device and make the user wait for the update to complete, locking them out from using it even for emergency calls, which isn't ideal.
As of December 2024, the Galaxy A55 is the only Samsung smartphone that supports seamless updates. And while having two system partitions technically requires more space on the internal storage, thereby reducing how much space is available to the user, Samsung managed to get around that limitation on the Galaxy A55, and we hope the same will be true on the Galaxy S25 lineup as well.
