Spare Samsung Galaxy A33 took two days and seven updates to revive

Pulling an old phone out of a drawer can turn into more work than buying a new one. Simon Sharwood, a columnist at The Register, described how a 2022 Samsung Galaxy A33 that had sat in storage for months needed two days of attention before it worked again, and argued that the blame lies with how vendors build software and handle updates.

Seven updates, each one a manual decision

The A33 was his daily phone for about a year before he replaced it with a pricier handset and kept the old one as a spare. Samsung has promised security updates for the model until 2027, so the device was still within support. Seconds after it was charged and switched on, it offered an operating system update from April 2025 and then six more; every download and installation had to be approved by hand.

The midrange model is slow, so the process turned into overlapping updates: an install in progress, a reboot to finish the previous one, a prompt to approve or schedule the next download, and another login. Sharwood did not need the phone urgently, so he gave it attention around meals and bedtime. Two days later he had a slow, old, but functional backup handset.

A USB-C port that imagined moisture all winter

Charging came first and was the stranger problem. The A33 is a budget model without wireless charging, and for months it insisted there was moisture in its USB-C port and refused to take power. It was stored in a box of old technology on the floor of a home office in Sydney, Australia: no direct sunlight, a small, warm and dry room. The warning appeared anyway.

The cure was weather rather than repair. When the temperature passed 30°C, the owner left the phone in a warm, breezy spot for half a day; the phantom moisture evaporated and the battery finally started to fill.

Better software, and a better updater

The column follows Richard Speed, The Register's Microsoft watcher, who wrote on 20 September about spending seven hours bringing a Windows 11 machine up to date. Sharwood agreed with his conclusion: vendors should ship better software so devices rely less on updates, and they should make updating less painful.

For Samsung he suggested two specific changes. Past updates should be bundled into cumulative downloads, so a phone left offline for a few months needs a single intervention to be modernized. And when a handset does need several updates, it should say so and point owners to Smart Switch, Samsung's desktop application, which can install cumulative updates in one go.