Last updated: March 21st, 2024 at 17:00 UTC+01:00
For whatever reason, Samsung has been avoiding Android’s seamless update feature for the past eight years now. Not anymore! The Galaxy A55 is the first Samsung phone to use Google’s seamless update feature, and it will likely come to more Galaxy phones soon.
Seamless updates work by installing an update to a secondary system partition instead of the primary one, and then booting from that secondary partition the next time the device is restarted. The primary and secondary partitions are essentially switched upon reboot, and this is a process that is repeated every time a new software update is available.
Today, the Galaxy A55 became the first Samsung phone to receive a seamless Android update, consisting of a new security patch. Incidentally, this is also the first firmware update for the Galaxy A55, and we’re guessing future updates will be just as seamless.
Users can and will be able to tell that their Galaxy phones are installing a seamless update judging by the new split progress bar. It consists of two sections named “Downloading and installing…” and “Verification.” We were also able to confirm seamless updates are present via the use of Android’s developer tools.
The first reboot after a seamless update might take up to 90 seconds to finish — or at least, it did on our Galaxy A55 — but there are no more update processing loading screens and spinning cog-wheels that lock you out from using the phone for a few minutes.
Support for seamless updates requires two system partitions and, therefore, more storage space, but on the Galaxy A55, it doesn’t look like the storage space available to the user is affected in any way compared to Galaxy phones without seamless updates.