The Samsung Galaxy S25 series was just introduced this week, and it’s the company’s first flagship smartphone to support seamless updates. In short, this means faster updates for users with software installation taking less time than usual. This isn’t a first for Android phones or even Samsung. Seamless updates was introduced in 2016 and Samsung implemented the feature in 2024 with the Galaxy A55.
But up until now, it hasn’t used it in its flagship devices. The reason this is a big deal is because it’s a time-saver. This will be especially true if updates are larger, requiring longer downtime when it comes to the installation portion of the update. For Galaxy S25 users, seamless updates will speed up this process by a noticeable amount, all because of how the process works.
As pointed out by SamMobile, seamless updates work by way of factory-implemented A/B partitions. An A/B partition setup allows firmware to be downloaded to a free partition. Once the download is finished, the installation process begins in the background. This allows the phone to continue being used during the installation process. Which isn’t how things work on a phone without A/B partitions.
Without seamless updates, firmware is downloaded and then the phone automatically reboots to move onto the installation step. If the firmware download is a rather large file, it might be several minutes before the phone reboots and is ready for use. With the Galaxy S25, a reboot only needs to happen once the installation in the background is finished.
Because of this, the reboot process should take considerably less time. And therefore, the user doesn’t experience as much downtime. Of course, this isn’t going to matter to all users. Especially if you have automatic updates turned off, or if you tend to initiate an update when you don’t need to use your phone. For anyone else, this will most certainly be a useful feature to have.
No storage penalty
Although this hasn’t necessarily been confirmed yet, it doesn’t appear that there’s a penalty to the storage for having this feature. Meaning, you shouldn’t end up with less storage available when installing updates this way. This is according to SamMobile who states that they couldn’t find any evidence of a storage penalty when looking into it. All-in-all it seems like a minor feature but it has real benefits. Namely saving the user time. It’s a quality-of-life feature, and one we’re happy to see. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series is now available for pre-order.
Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25
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