Samsung Galaxy S21 series is one of the most premium smartphones you can buy in the market, and it’s loaded with features that users already like. The South Korean electronics giant has virtually every smartphone segment covered with a plethora of devices for users to choose from, and a cycle of prompt OTA and security updates. That said, Samsung is still to bring the support for Android’s seamless updates that has been a feature present for Android devices since 2016.
Many OEMs (Google, OnePlus, Motorola, LG etc) have been using this feature to enhance the user experience by performing the OTA updates in the background without that long cycle where you cannot use the phone for 15-20 minutes. Samsung has not introduced this feature for its line-up of phones and the Galaxy S21 series also seems to miss it.
The seamless updates make use of A/B partitions to download and install updates in the background as one still continues to use the phone. This comes with the luxury of not waiting for the update to install while forced to not do anything with the device for that time. Secondly, it also lessens the chance of corrupting the data as the update happens in a separate partition.
Earlier it was assumed that Google is going to make the seamless updates feature compulsory with Android 11, but it didn’t happen. That gives Samsung reason enough to ignore this feature and continue with the age-old method of pushing updates on devices.
One reason could be that Samsung’s own software skin One UI is quite large and occupies a lot of space. Adopting the seamless partitions method would need a space of at least 3GB which doesn’t favor Samsung devices’ already big space requirement crunch.
Doing it the traditional way suits Samsung and in a way is an advantage. For now, though the flagship series by Samsung doesn’t support this feature and hopefully it will be added sometime in the near future to make the user experience slightly better.
