How Samsung turned months of inactivity into a very attention-seeking smartphone
Your spare Android won’t come back to life in a hurry but – like neglected PCs – it really should
Updating a 2022 Samsung Galaxy A33 Android smartphone required a significant amount of patience and attention. After a year of use, the midrange device started to feel sluggish, prompting the author to consider replacing it with a newer model. On a spring day in Sydney, Australia, when the temperature rose above 30°C (86°F), the phone finally accepted charging after having mistakenly indicated it had moisture in its USB-C port.
Soon after, the phone displayed an OS update from April 2025, followed by six more updates, each requiring manual consent for download and installation. The updates conflicted with each other, causing overlapping download and reboot cycles. Despite the inconvenience, the author managed to install two days' worth of updates, resulting in a functional backup phone.
The author agreed with Richard Speed's suggestion that smartphone vendors need to streamline the update process by bundling previous updates into single downloads and improving the detection of devices needing multiple updates. Samsung could also benefit from integrating its Smart Switch desktop app to facilitate cumulative update installations in one go.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
