Samsung's Upgrade Choice—Bad News For Millions Of Galaxy Owners
Samsung's update headlines continue
What a week for Samsung. After confirming an awkward delay to its already long-delayed One UI 7 upgrade, at least the rollout has now restarted. But while Galaxy owners await the major security and privacy upgrades Android 15 will bring, there's some more bad news for users hoping to get Android's new upgrade.
That said, 'new' might be stretching the point here. We're talking seamless updates, which Google introduced to Pixels in 2016, but which Samsung is only now introducing for its most recent phones. Seamless updates download and install to a separate partition to the one running on the device. This means a simple restart triggers the update, rather than the longer downtime as new software downloads and installs. From a security perspective, anything that makes updates simpler and faster is a good thing.
We already knew this was a hardware upgrade and so even recent flagships like the Galaxy S24 miss out. The new S25 has the upgrade, but as reported by SamMobile, 'the Galaxy A36 boasts seamless updates, whereas the more affordable Galaxy A26 does not. Initially, it was believed that all three new Galaxy A (2025) devices — including the Galaxy A56 — may benefit from this convenient feature. Nevertheless, we now know that Samsung did not set up the Galaxy A26 with an A/B partition system.'
There is no fix for this. 'Manufacturers like Samsung have to set up the A/B partitions from the factory, so a phone released without the seamless updates feature cannot receive an A/B partition system later through a firmware update. In other words, the Galaxy A26 will lack seamless updates forever.' The same is true for even recent flagships that were not launched with the capability.
Samsung's updates have become an increasingly headline issue. And while One UI 7 has been the major focus, as One UI 8 will soon become, the monthly fun and games continues as we assess whether Samsung's release contains all Google's monthly fixes and how quickly this will roll out to devices dependent on region, model and carrier.
The lack of seamless updates is an oddity for Samsung given Pixel's universal deployment. But the bigger issue is down to Android and not Samsung. Google's control of its hardware and software stack essentially matches Apple's control of iPhone. Even Samsung — Android's leading OEM — can't compete with this, and nor can any of the others. Something needs to change to prevent Pixel establishing an unmatchable and awkward lead over the others. Meanwhile, Google's control of Android while competing with its other OEMs becomes increasingly awkward from an optics perspective.
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