Android N to Feature Seamless Updates Similar to Chromebooks

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Published 19 May 2016

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Android N

Borrowing a page out of Chrome OS and Chromebooks, the Android team over at Google has added a new feature in Android N: seamless updates. Chromebooks can automatically download an update in the background and them seamlessly install it when the next time you restart it, and the same feature is now coming to Android.

The Android team at Google borrowed some code from the Chromebook team to add the same functionality to Android. So, the next time there is an OTA update available for your device, Android N will silently download it in the background — presumably over Wi-Fi — and then whenever you restart the device, the update will be installed automatically. Since Android N does not have the ‘Android is upgrading’ process, the boot up process after installing the update will be pretty quick as well.

As Google explains, Android N is capable of doing this by having two system image partitions: online and offline. When a new update is found, it is installed in the offline partition, and the next time you reboot the handset, the device automatically swaps the offline partition with the online partition. A side effect of this feature is that Android OS will now take up more storage space on the internal storage of the handset.

Since seamless updates is a part of Android N itself, it will be available to all devices that run the OS and will not just be limited to Nexus devices.

[Via Android Developers]