The Galaxy Watch 9 installs firmware updates in the background while you keep wearing it. Owners spotted the behaviour while installing the watch’s first software update since launch, a roughly 193MB package carrying the August 5, 2026 security patch. Instead of the watch going dark for several minutes, the new firmware downloads and writes itself to a second partition while the current one keeps running. All you get at the end is a short restart.
Android has supported this since Nougat in 2016. It is called seamless, or A/B, updating: the device keeps two system partitions and writes the new build to the inactive one. Samsung was slow to adopt it on phones, starting with the Galaxy A55 and later extending it across the Galaxy S25 line. This appears to be the first time it has reached a Galaxy watch.
Older Galaxy Watches are not getting this
This is the part worth understanding before you wait for it. Seamless updates depend on how the device partitions its storage, which is set at the factory. A watch that shipped with a single system partition cannot be converted to a dual-partition layout by a software update.
So One UI 9 Watch will not bring this to a Galaxy Watch 8, a Watch 7, or anything older. Those watches will keep going offline for the length of an install, however long Samsung supports them. If background updating matters to you, it is a reason to buy new hardware, not a reason to wait for a patch.
Whether the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 behaves the same way is not yet established. It launched alongside the Watch 9 and plausibly shares the same storage architecture, but nobody has published a confirmed observation of seamless installation on it. We covered the first firmware rollout for both watches on September 1, and the update notes said nothing about how the install would run.
Samsung has not mentioned it anywhere
That silence is the odd part. Seamless updating is not in the Galaxy Watch 9’s headline specifications, and it is not called out in the changelog for the update that introduced it. Users found it because their watch stayed usable during an install that historically would have bricked their afternoon.
It is a small feature, and Samsung clearly does not see it as a selling point. But it is the sort of thing a buyer comparing the Watch 9 against a discounted Watch 8 would want on the spec sheet, precisely because it is a hardware-level difference that cannot be closed later. Leaving it undocumented makes the older watch look like better value than it is.
Source: Salian (@ThePhoneFuel), via SammyFans and Android Authority
