As of this writing, Samsung has started updating its mobiles to Android 17 with Samsung’s user interface One UI 9. First are the top models of the Galaxy S26 series, but four models have already been launched with One UI and Android 17 pre-installed. These are the foldable Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra and Z Flip 8 which were launched in July, as well as the Galaxy S26 FE which arrived in early autumn.
We will go through the major news that is still there, some of the small details that have changed and also the functions we expected that are missing. And then we throw in a news that will come to Samsung mobiles this fall with or without One UI 9.
As of this writing, Samsung has started updating its mobiles to Android 17 with Samsung’s user interface One UI 9. First are the top models of the Galaxy S26 series, but four models have already been launched with One UI and Android 17 pre-installed. These are the foldable Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra and Z Flip 8 which were launched in July, as well as the Galaxy S26 FE which arrived in early autumn.
We will go through the major news that is still there, some of the small details that have changed and also the functions we expected that are missing. And then we throw in a news that will come to Samsung mobiles this fall with or without One UI 9.
My Fancam: Focus on the main character in videos
My Fancam is a video editing feature that saves a lot of work, especially if you’re going to post to social media.
Other manufacturers have video features in the camera that lock focus on a person and maybe even follow the subject with the image crop, but Min Fankam works differently in that you can instead choose the focus for the video afterwards. You do that in Samsung’s Gallery app.
Here’s how it works: You open Samsung’s gallery app and select the video where you want to focus on a person. It doesn’t have to be a new video, or even a video you recorded with your own mobile, it can be a movie someone sent you. However, the video must not be too low-resolution, as it must be further cropped. If it is too low resolution, the function will be shaded in the interface.
Once you’ve opened the movie, tap the AI icon, the one that looks like a collection of stars. Here is already the function to identify and filter out various sounds in the video with AI and now it has been joined by a button for My Fancom, with an icon with a small torso.
If you press that button, the video will be analyzed with AI and people in it will be identified. Once that’s done, you can choose which of them the video should focus on. You can also choose the format of the final movie, such as square, 9:16 or 3:4. If you were thinking of publishing the video on social media, it might be smart to choose the format that is standard for the service.
Then the film is processed and you get a new video where the person is in the point of view throughout the film, and both the original and the new film can be saved separately. The result can be surprisingly artistic, for example by starting by zooming in, and making smooth sweeps, but you have no control over that because it is created with AI. But it is only the cut itself that was made by AI, the footage itself is not AI-processed.
Since it is a function that requires AI calculation locally on the mobile, we should not expect it to come to all mobiles that receive One UI 9, but only the top models of recent years with sufficient capacity for AI calculations.
Changes to the interface: The music player and the Quick panel
The changes in the interface are mostly aesthetic, but not only.
One UI 8.5 had many small changes in the user interface, in One UI 9 they are easily counted. For example, you may notice that the music player widget looks different. It’s the one that appears on the lock screen and in the quick panel if you’re listening to music or podcasts. As before, it shows how far you are in the current play with an animation that matches the color of the background, but it now has a bit more vibrant colors in the animation. The widget has also become a little more compact.
In the quick panel, however, the controls for volume and brightness have become a little wider, and the buttons for dark mode and silent have been broken out. It’s not just aesthetic, because if you rearrange the quick panel, those buttons are no longer attached to the light and volume controls, and you can move them somewhere else or remove them entirely.
Keep track of what your AI assistant is doing on the mobile
Samsung has made it easier to see and control which apps the AI assistant has used on the mobile.
Samsung mobiles have two pre-installed AI assistants, Google Gemini and Samsung’s own Bixby, which you can ask to take control of the phone’s functions with voice commands. Doing things just by talking to the mobile can be extremely convenient, for example you can just ask the mobile what is in your calendar and have it read out, but it can also be a risk, and if you feel that you don’t have a grasp of what the AI assistant is doing with your mobile, in One UI 9 you can check it in the settings.
How to do it: Go into the settings and select Security and Privacy. Scroll down to near the bottom and you’ll find an option called Activity for AI Assistant. Here you can see which apps the AI assistant has retrieved information from in the last 24 hours or the last 7 days. Clicking on the opportunity will take you directly to the conversation you had with the assistant so you can see what it did.
If you don’t want the assistant to have access to that app, you can adjust it in settings for that assistant. For Gemini, for example, open the Gemini app, click the icon for your account, then connected apps, and you can uncheck the apps you don’t want Gemini to have access to.
Custom cards in Now Brief
Samsung is struggling to make Now Brief relevant with new features.
You know Now Brief, the little widget on the lock screen that’s supposed to give you a summary of everything you need to know with the help of AI? We who test mobile phones use it out of duty, of course, but we understand if you don’t. The information Samsung has managed to compile so far has been concentrated on the weather forecast and today’s events in the calendar, as well as more or less random recommendations of Youtube clips.
In an effort to make Now Brief more relevant, Samsung has now added the ability to create custom cards in Now Brief. You do this in the function’s settings, where you go under own cards and select plus.
However, the options are still limited. You can choose between three categories, weather, health and videos. In all cases, it’s mostly about creating a widget where you choose which information to display. A widget screen is exactly what Now Brief is reduced to if Samsung fails to deliver on its promise to anticipate what information you want.
Better arrangement of parental control
Samsung has gathered all parental control functions in one place.
If you have a tablet or mobile phone that is used by a child, you may want to use the parental control functions. Previously, they shared a heading in the settings with digital well-being, but now they have been given their own heading.
Here you can set time limits for phone usage and also for individual apps, and you can turn on filters for what content should be displayed on the web or in the app store. These features are not new, but they were previously spread across several different apps.
If you have a family group where you control your child’s phone, either via Samsung’s own function or Google’s Family Link, you will find shortcuts to those functions here as well.
The features we don’t find: App Bubbles and Now Nudge
Some of the expected news in One UI 9 will be an anticlimax.
One of the more noticeable news in Android 17 for users is the app bubbles feature. By long-pressing an app, you can choose to have it appear as a floating bubble on the screen. The idea is to make it easier to quickly switch between apps you use in parallel. We find this feature in Google’s Pixel 11 series with Android 17, but not in Samsung’s mobiles. Samsung simply hasn’t implemented this feature in its One UI 9 to Android 17.
A function that Samsung stands for itself, and which is definitely implemented but we still don’t see the smoke of is Now Nudge.
Now Nudge is an in-system context recognition feature that’s trending right now. Google has similar functions in its Pixel mobiles, but not in Sweden. Now Nudge, on the other hand, should be available in Sweden, but we don’t notice any of that.
With Now Nudge turned on in the settings, the system in messaging apps should recognize certain types of information and help you further. The two examples that Samsung gives are that it should recognize that you are talking about a place and open a window with the map app, and open the calendar if you are talking about booking a meeting at a specific time.
This is in theory, but we’ve tried different combinations of messaging apps where we almost too clearly wrote about appointment bookings and meeting in different places, and got absolutely zero reaction from Now Nudge. We have seen other testers have described the same thing. Samsung clearly has a ways to go here.
Photo Sync: From OneDrive to Google Photos
Samsung is in the process of re-directing its cloud collaboration.
Samsung’s solution for saving photos in the cloud has varied over time. For a period they had their own cloud service Samsung Cloud, before for many years they entered into a collaboration with Microsoft, where the images were synchronized with the Onedrive cloud service.
The collaboration manifested itself in the fact that both Microsoft’s Onedrive app and Samsung Gallery came in special versions for Samsung mobiles, where the cloud sync function was integrated into the app.
That collaboration is now ending these days, and in the new version of Samsung’s gallery app that will be rolled out, you will instead be offered the option to display images synchronized with Google Photos in the Gallery app.
As Google Photos is part of the Android system, it automatically has access to the mobile’s images, but syncing with Google’s cloud service is optional. You get a limited amount of free space and if you want more, you need to pay for a subscription.
The feature starts appearing in version 15.9.01.7 of Samsung Gallery. When available, the user can choose which albums to sync and decide whether uploading is allowed via mobile network or only over Wi-Fi. To use the service, a Samsung device with Android 13 or later is required and that both Samsung and Google accounts are logged in to the phone.
Samsung Gallery only displays images that have been synced from a Samsung device via the new feature. Photos previously uploaded directly to Google Photos will not automatically appear in the Gallery app.