It’s been a long time since seamless updates were implemented in Android. It’s a nearly decade-old feature that may not be familiar to you, but it’s crucial to making sure the process of updating your phone doesn’t take forever.

For some reason, Samsung phones have not yet implemented such updates; It was one of the few layers of customization that didn’t follow this practice further than recommended by Google. The Galaxy A55 is the first Galaxy to implement these and this marks a before and after for the company.

The fastest updates come to Samsung

Getting an update knowing it will take a long time to download and even longer to restart and install everything. All of us with Android phones have gone through this process. To speed up the process, Google implemented Seamless Updates with 7.0 Nougat, updates that minimize the downtime associated with this process.

They are known as A/B updates., because they work thanks to two parts. Until now, everything on Samsung phones was managed through a section. The OTA update arrived, downloaded, and then a reboot was requested. For a significant period of time, the system loaded the updated version and the well-known “installation applications” of Samsung mobile phones.

“OTA updates can occur while the system is running without interrupting the user. Users can continue to use their devices during OTA; the only interruption during the update is the device rebooting to the updated partition.” Google.

When an update arrives on a mobile phone with A/B partitions, We can continue to use the system. The only pause will occur during a brief reboot required to load the partition on which the OTA was installed. The reboot won’t take much longer than usual (rebooting without loading files), so you won’t have to spend a few minutes without using the phone.

These are important not only for agility in the installation: Seamless Updates are important at the security level. If everything depends on a single partition and the update fails, restarting the phone will most likely leave it in the same state. boot loop (keeps loading) and never starts.

In A/B partitions the error will only affect one of the partitions, so if there is some kind of installation error the phone will boot into one of them and we will see the “installation failed” message, but the phone will be able to do this. To continue running and try to install again. any error will only affect the set of partitions we don’t use.

Samsung was one of the few manufacturers that refused to go after such updates, making the installation process quite tedious.

Image | Xataka

in Xataka | How to know how many Android updates your mobile phone will get with this website?