Well, it looks like Samsung Russia is planning to update all the older flagships from the company to Lollipop ahead of newer devices. After the Galaxy Note 3, the Galaxy S4 has started receiving the Android 5.0.1 update in the country. The update is rolling out to the Exynos variant of the device (GT-I9500), and is rather huge at 1049MB. It looks like the update is so big that Samsung will be removing some pre-loaded apps like Google Play Books, Movies and others to make space. It’s likely only those apps that can be downloaded from the Play Store (and Galaxy Apps) will be removed, though this should not be taken as a sign of the bloatware trimming that Samsung is pursuing (as that will only take effect with the Galaxy S6.)

The update should bring all the features of Lollipop, like enhanced performance, lockscreen and heads-up notifications, and a redesigned interface, features that we exclusively previewed a couple of weeks ago. You should be seeing a notification for the OTA on your Galaxy S4 over the course of the next few days; the update doesn’t seem to be showing up on Kies just yet, but it hopefully will as a computer would certainly come in handy for downloading all that data.

Update: You can now download the full firmware for the Galaxy S4’s Russian Android 5.0 update from our firmware section.

Thanks, Serkan!