Smartphone makers have come a long, long way in their approach to handling Android updates, and we've seen companies like Samsung really rise to a point where they're competitive with Google in terms of speed and release cadence. But for all the credit Samsung's update program is due, there's still been one glaring blind spot: the lack of support for seamless A/B updates. Last fall, we found ourselves hopeful that the Galaxy S23 series might buck the trend and finally embrace seamless updates, but unfortunately, we can now confirm that won't be the case.

The idea behind seamless support is to minimize your downtime when updating your phone. Instead of having to sit through a lengthy reboot and install process, a phone with seamless updates can install its software to a second partition while you continue to use the main one. Then, when everything's ready, you can boot to the new one with little disruption.

As Google was putting the finishing touches on Android 13 last year, Mishaal Rahman spotted that the company was planning to mandate support for virtual A/B partitions. These virtual partitions had emerged as the optimal way to approach seamless updates, while keeping storage requirements down. And if Samsung had to support virtual A/B partitions, it sure felt likely that its phones would similarly support seamless updates.

Alas, that is not the case. Having gotten our hands on the new Galaxy S23 Ultra, we ran the phone through the Treble Info tool, and can confirm that Samsung is not turning over a new leaf — the phone once again does not support seamless updates. While that's far from actually surprising, giving Samsung's established reluctance to make this change (not to mention its comfortable relationship with Google that probably spares it extra pressure), it's nonetheless frustrating.

Maybe next year will finally be the one to ditch 128GB and leave Samsung with even fewer excuses for why it won't play nice with seamless updates.