Samsung Galaxy S23 doesn’t support Android’s seamless updates yet again

Ben Schoon | Feb 3 2023 - 11:26 am PT

In a continued pattern, Samsung has yet again shipped its latest flagship without support for a years-old Android feature. Yet again, the Galaxy S23 series doesn’t support seamless updates.

For the sixth year in a row, Samsung has skipped out on support for seamless updates on the Galaxy S23 series. On checking our Galaxy S23 Ultra, seamless updates were reported as not available by both Inware and Treble Check, apps that check system data to report back on information such as this. We also manually checked via ADB.

Frankly, this comes as no surprise, as Samsung has shown time and time again that it clearly just doesn’t want to adopt this feature. Last year’s Galaxy S22 series also lacked the feature.

What are seamless updates? The feature, which Google introduced in 2016, allows Android to install updates in the background to then be applied in a later reboot. It’s typically slower than a regular update process, but it does provide a layer of safety for the update process as the A/B partitions can be reverted if something goes wrong.

Samsung is largely expected to skip out on seamless updates due to concerns with storage, given the feature tends to eat up extra storage. Of course, if that were the sole problem, one wonders why it’s still in place given Samsung is mostly doing away with 128GB storage tiers. Meanwhile, Samsung’s system files eat up over 50GB on our Galaxy S23 Ultra, up even more over last year’s Galaxy S22 Ultra which lost over 30GB to system files.

Meanwhile, Google is still improving on seamless updates, with information spotted late last year showing meaningful improvements to the speed of updates that should appear in future Pixel smartphones.

Pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S23 series are open now. Buyers get a $100 credit with their pre-order, and an additional $50 by clicking our special link here. Samsung is offering trade-in values up to $750. We’ve also broken down carrier deals here so you can get the best value.

Max Weinbach contributed to this story.