The Galaxy S23 series skips on “seamless updates” support

Seems like the Galaxy S23 series skips on “seamless updates” support. While they use dynamic partitions (ie. they have a “super” partition), they don’t implement the virtual A/B partition scheme.

IIRC, devices that launch with Android 13 using chipsets with vendor software that supports virtual A/B (I know that’s a mouthful) are required to implement VAB to pass Vendor Test Suite/meet Vendor Software Requirements for Android 13. Perhaps an exemption was given?

It makes sense why Samsung devices skipped “seamless updates” support for so many generations. Samsung reserves a ton of space for system apps/files. They serve a lot of markets, and many kinds of users, have lots of partnerships and have their own ecosystem of apps.

If Samsung had adopted the old A/B partition scheme introduced with Android 7.1, then you’d have even less space to work with. So even though they got flak for not supporting seamless updates, I can see why they didn’t.

A/B has been replaced with virtual A/B, though. And in Android 12, virtual A/B added support for compressed snapshots. VABc is almost as space efficient as non-A/B is. I’m not sure space is why the S23 doesn’t have seamless updates. It might be something else.

If you want to read up on non-A/B, A/B, virtual A/B, etc. then check out this article. A lot of people still think that seamless updates = A/B when A/B was supplanted by virtual A/B a few releases back!

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