Google is working on making OTA updates faster. A new set of patches has been submitted to AOSP that speed up OTAs on devices that use the virtual A/B with compression update mechanism. Combined, these improvements bring a full OTA install time from ~23 minutes to ~13 minutes! pic.twitter.com/2hDliWzUZZ
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) November 30, 2022
Trying to make this simple, let’s just say that Google has been able to reduce the size of device mapping snapshots used in the Virtual A/B updating process by 25% to 40%. Any changes made by the update engine to the snapshots are stored on what is known as “copy-on-write” (COW) devices. Eventually, these changes are merged into dynamic partitions that need to be updated. Google has reduced the merge time by 40%. Once the process is finished, the COW and snapshot devices are deleted giving the user additional storage to use.
