Categories: Mobile

One of Samsung’s latest mid-rangers supports seamless updates, another one doesn’t

Samsung has been incredibly slow to adopt seamless updates for its Android smartphones for reasons that still aren’t very clear. The company finally made inroads with the Galaxy S25 series, as well as the Galaxy A55. So, naturally, we assumed that all of its devices launching after those would have support for the feature.

Alas, no. The recently released Galaxy A26 and Galaxy A36 have just received their first updates in Europe, and, as the saying goes, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the A36 does in fact support seamless updates.

The bad news is that the A26 doesn’t. Suffice to say, this makes no sense, but it is what it is. The A56 hasn’t received its first update yet, but we are of course hoping it does support seamless updates, since its predecessor does.

Seamless updates use two identical system partitions. When you get an update, it’s installed onto the partition that isn’t currently being used by the system – thus the installation can be fully performed while you’re using the phone, there’s no need for the installation to happen upon a reboot. At the end you still have to reboot the phone, but it’s a much, much quicker affair as all it needs to do is switch between partitions.

As this requires the two partitions to exist from day one, there is zero chance the Galaxy A26 will ever support seamless updates, unfortunately. And so Samsung continues to be incredibly slow at rolling this out – but then it has been slow with rollouts in general lately, so it’s not really that surprising.