Android's clever seamless updates feature has finally come to Samsung's flagship phones. The Galaxy S25 is the company's first high-end mobile device to support seamless updates, a.k.a. A/B partitions. The feature is available for all three S25 models, and here's how users will benefit from it.

We explained A/B partitions in greater detail last year when the first rumors about Galaxy S25 seamless updates emerged. The gist of it is that A/B partitions shorten the perceived duration of new firmware update installations.

When you apply a new update to a phone without A/B partitions, you first download the firmware and then wait for the phone to reboot and complete the installation. This process can take minutes, and you can't use your phone before the installation completes. No internet access, no messages, and no phone calls.

The story continues after our Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on video

A/B partitions solve this problem without downsides. When a phone is set up with A/B partitions from the factory, as the Galaxy S25 is, new firmware updates are installed automatically on one of the two partitions — whichever one is free.

This allows the phone to download and install new OS updates in the background while you continue to use the phone uninterrupted.

Once the installation is complete, you'll just reboot the phone once to switch to the other partition. This is a simple reboot, and the process is significantly shorter, which means less downtime for the user.

A/B partitions have to be set up from the factory and can't be added later through firmware updates. And as far as we can tell on the Galaxy S25, there is no storage penalty. So, it's a good thing that the Galaxy S25 supports this. There are no downsides to having this feature.

Google introduced A/B partitions for Android in 2016. For whatever reason, Samsung didn't use this feature until last year when it tested it on the Galaxy A55. The S25 series is its first flagship to adopt seamless updates.

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