Sony Mobile has introduced support for A/B (Seamless) System Updates in the Xperia XZ2 and XA2 series of phones. For those unaware, seamless updates were first introduced by Google in Android Nougat, but has not seen wide support from manufacturers until recently. It’s primarily the Google Pixel phones that have supported seamless updates up until now.
A phone that features seamless updates has two system partitions, A and B. When a firmware update arrives, it is downloaded and installed on the inactive partition. Once the update is installed on the inactive partition, the phone will reboot and switch to the partition with the newly updated firmware.
The idea behind seamless updates is that users can carry on using their phone during an OTA (over-the-air) update, with very little downtime. It also reduces the risk of errors on a new OTA firmware update. For example, if there is a problem with the new update, then the phone will reboot back to the old partition, until the new update is tried again.
It’s great to see Sony supporting seamless updates on its 2018 series of Xperia smartphones. We would expect that we should see this support on most of its future premium smartphones.
Xperia XA2 screenshot confirms Seamless Update support
App used: Treble Check
