There was early bad news for new Samsung Galaxy S25 buyers, with an initial security update leaving devices two-months behind older flagships. The better news is that this has been resolved with a new firmware update, albeit a critical vulnerability remains. But for Galaxy S24, S23 and S22 owners, there’s something else to worry about.
First to this latest release. As reported on Thursday by SamMobile, “Samsung has released the first software update to the Galaxy S25 series. It brings the latest security patch and bug fixes to the company’s newest high-end phones.”
This is now making its way onto Galaxy S25 phones on Korea, and will make its way out across the rest of the world in fairly short order. “The new update (585.9MB in download size) comes with firmware version S93xNKSU1AYB3 and includes the February 2025 security patch that fixes dozens of security vulnerabilities.”
The outstanding issue is CVE-2024-53104, which Google warns “may be under limited, targeted exploitation.” While official details are scarce, Android hardener GrapheneOS advises that ”it’s likely one of the USB bugs exploited by forensic data extraction tools.”
That fix is now rolling out to Pixels, but was not included in Samsung’s February security update. It may be deploying quietly without inclusion in its bulletin, but no clarity on that thus far. This leaves all flagships in the same position.
But there is now a key difference between the Galaxy S25 and the others. As trailed pre-launch, the S25 includes seamless updates which negate the need for a long power while the software installs and the phone reboots. A seamless update — which Pixels have had for years — installs in the background in a separate partition, and then a quick reboot completes the update. This had been a memory hog previously, but a new virtualized process is more targeted and keeps the storage overhead to a minimum.
It was always likely this would become a big deal for the Galaxy S25, but user commentary suggests it could be more a differentiator than expected. “The seamless update is a big deal,” commented one user on the Galaxy-maker’s forum, while another said “this is one good reason to get the S25 series… faster updates.”
Another user went even further, “in my opinion, it’s a bigger deal than AI at the moment,” citing the rollback option as the reason “seamless updates is probably the best reason to update to the S25 series. I’m surprised that it didn’t get more attention!”
It’s not universal though. “I can’t stand ‘seamless updates’,” complained one Redditor, explaining that “one of the most fun accidental upgrades from moving from Pixel to the s24 Ultra was the lack of background OS updates. It bogged the system down and made everything choppy for hours on the Pixel 7 I had.”
Whether good or bad, it is certainly different. Over the coming weeks we’ll know whether Galaxy S24 owners in particular feel they’re missing out.
Meanwhile, whatever your flavor of Galaxy, make sure it’s updated as soon as the latest release is downloaded onto your phone — seamlessly or otherwise. In addition to Google’s latest Android zero-day, there are a raft of other important security updates.
