New Samsung Galaxy Phones Won't Make You Wait for Updates

howtogeek.com:

Never ask a Samsung phone owner how long it takes to install an update. Most Android smartphones install system updates in the background, but Samsung devices still perform updates the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, this appears to be changing, at least in some new and upcoming Galaxy phones.

The new Galaxy A55 5G utilizes Android's Seamless Updates feature. Instead of replacing your firmware from the ground up, Seamless Updates reserves a bit of storage space for new updates and leaves your old firmware intact. You can play with apps or games while a Seamless Update is in progress, and if something goes wrong, you can recover your old Android firmware from its storage partition.

Seamless Updates was introduced in 2016, and its early implementation was far from perfect. Installing an update in the background could have a dramatic impact on smartphone performance, and because Seamless Updates requires partitioned storage, it permanetly reduced phones' useable storage space. The performance problem has since been resolved, and Seamless Updates now uses a virtual partition system that only takes up storage space during the update process.

Now that Seamless Updates has matured, Samsung is willing to take the plunge. The new Galaxy A55 5G is Samsung's first smartphone with Seamless Updates. If you attempt to install an update, the phone will perform the update in the background, rather than forcing you to sit through a 20-minute loading screen. You'll be asked to restart the phone once the update is installed—awesome.

Some users believe that this change was forced upon Samsung. A recent comment in AOSP shows that Android 15 will end support for "non-A/B" partitioned updates in Android 15. However, Samsung has danced around eight years of Seamless Update requirements. If Samsung wants to avoid Seamless Updates, it can simply reprogram Android 15 and disable the feature, just as it has with past Android versions.

Presumably, Samsung will utilize Seamless Updates in all