People are holding onto their phones for longer periods of time before upgrading. Manufacturers have responded to this shift by increasing the frequency with which major software upgrades are released, with flagship devices often receiving the longest period of support.

Given the increasing significance of software updates, it makes sense to streamline the process by which users can upgrade to the latest version. Seamless Updates, a novel way to this fundamental aspect of smartphone ownership, debuted in 2016 and is now supported by a wide variety of devices, including the Google Pixel 7 series.

Using Seamless Updates, or A/B partition updates, you can upgrade your phone’s software without waiting for the installation procedure to complete. In other words, the update will be installed in the background while you continue to use your phone normally.

This method works for devices that feature both an active and inactive partition. The active partition is where the device is actually being used, while the updating process is happening invisibly in the background on the other partition. Once the installation is complete, the user needs only reboot, and the loading screen will no longer appear.

While A/B updates have been available for other devices since 2016, Samsung has yet to implement this feature for its own phones. It appears that with their newest flagship series, the Galaxy S23 series, the firm has decided to leave this feature out. Computer Base’s Nicolas La Rocco made this discovery and tweeted about it. 

Samsung doesn’t implement this vital Android functionality due to storage concerns caused by Android Seamless Updates.

However, Samsung can easily increase the base to 256GB on its flagship products, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. In addition, it can reduce the size of the Samsung applications, which take up more than 50GB of space on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, in contrast to the loss of over 30GB on the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Given Samsung’s amicable relations with Google, it seems unlikely that the search giant would exert any pressure on the company to implement the Android Seamless Updates feature.