Here are 4 free tools to download updates onto Samsung Galaxy devices

If you’ve ever tried to search for firmware to install on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet, it can be pretty annoying. While companies like Google, OnePlus, and Xiaomi provide download links on their websites, Samsung has yet to offer an official firmware download portal. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many third-party Samsung firmware download sites. These sites scrape 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 which throttles the download speed for the base tier. For higher bandwidth or more advanced functions, you’ll have to pay to get access.

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.

Download SamFirm_Reborn

2. SamFirm-continued and SamFwTool

2 Images

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.

Download SamFwTool

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.

Download SamFirm.js

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.

Download SamFetch

Have you tried any of the above or a similar project? Let us know in the comments below!