'Google is putting new rules in place for Android 11: it's going to make support for Android's "seamless update" feature mandatory for devices launching with the new OS. The news comes to us via an Android source code commit first spotted by XDA Developers, which reads, "Require Virtual A/B on R launches." In English, this means the seamless update system, which requires two partitions (labeled "A" and "B"), will be required on Android R, aka Android 11. Android's seamless update system was introduced in Android 7.0 Nougat (it was actually borrowed from Chrome OS) as a way to reduce the downtime caused by OS updates and to offer a recovery mechanism in case an update applies incorrectly. Applying an update to an operating system usually means taking the OS offline for an extended period of downtime. On Android, before seamless updates, the phone would boot into recovery and could be stuck on the "Installing System Update" screen for as much as 25 minutes. That's a lot of downtime, and during this time you can't run any apps, see any text messages, or get any phone calls. The downtime happens because updating the system files requires taking the system partition offline, but the seamless update system fixes this by just having a second copy of the system partition.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/google-makes-seamless-update-support... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/