4 free tools to get latest updates on your Samsung Galaxy devices
If you’ve ever tried looking for firmware to install on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet, it might be pretty annoying. While companies like Google, OnePlus, and Xiaomi provide download links on their websites, Samsung has yet to provide an official firmware download portal. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many Samsung firmware download sites out there. These sites scrap Samsung’s FUS (Firmware Update Server) for the latest firmware releases and categorize them by model number, carrier/region, and OS version. However, many of these services use a “freemium” model that throttles the base-tier download speed.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of community-developed tools to directly download a new software update for a compatible Galaxy device. We’ve talked about two such tools — SamFirm and Frija — many times in the past. Samloader is another open-source, cross-platform alternative. While I personally think that downloading Samsung firmware using one of these utilities is simple enough, some may still find them inadequate to meet their needs. If you do, then here are a few more solutions that make it even easier to grab official Samsung firmware packages for your device.
1. SamFirm_Reborn
Created by XDA Recognized Developer Ivan_Meler, SamFirm_Reborn is a reincarnation of the original SamFirm tool. The developer decompiled the legacy application and patched the codebase to make it compatible with Samsung’s server-side changes. SamFirm_Reborn is open source and it does offer a handy command-line interface besides the familiar GUI.
2. SamFirm-continued and SamFwTool
SamFirm-continued started its journey as yet another open-source fork of the legacy SamFirm, but the maintainer abandoned the project a few months ago. Later on, XDA Member Tungtata picked up the baton and created SamFwTool. One of the highlights of SamFwTool is the auto-detection feature. Just connect your phone in MTP mode and press “Auto detect” to identify your device model and region code.
3. SamFirm.js
The whole Samsung firmware downloading saga is now on a different level, as XDA Recognized Developer jesec has presented SamFirm.js, a streaming downloader, decryptor, and extractor coded in JavaScript. With SamFirm.js as the backend, you should be able to construct a web app to fetch stock Samsung firmware packages. The project is a collaboration between developers jesec and LuK1337.
4. SamFetch
In case you’re looking for a web API variant of the Samloader project, you should try out SamFetch. XDA Member YusufCihan reimplemented the functions from Samloader’s code as web routes in order to expose a simplified REST API to download Samsung firmware.
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