Samsung shares One UI 7 schedule, and it's just such a big letdown

Samsung’s Developer Conference 2024 is in full effect right now, kicking things off with the company’s keynote announcement. We had a lot of expectations going into today, and maybe the biggest has concerned news of One UI 7 — namely, what’s taking so long? The good news is that we now have some answer, even if they weren’t exactly what we were hoping to hear.

One UI 7 will be how Samsung brings Android 15 to its Galaxy family, and it feels like Android 15’s rollout has been slow all over. The new Pixels didn’t arrive with it, and while we’d normally expect to see Samsung busy with its own public beta program, so far nothing’s popped off. Today Samsung confirms that the One UI 7 beta is still coming, but doesn’t offer a firmer ETA beyond telling us it will happen sometime before the end of 2024.

That lack of greater specificity, especially at this late date, isn’t great, and has us curious if internal timetables may have slipped a little. To be fair, Samsung positions One UI 7 as a major shift to its interface, embracing “purposeful simplicity” and trying out a new look for the home screen app grid. But we’re also less than three months from 2025, and Samsung’s not even narrowing things down to one month or another.

Another big shocker concerns plans for the final release of One UI 7. While One UI 6 left beta and started arriving as updates for everyone last October, ahead of coming to the US in November, Samsung says that One UI 7 won’t make its formal arrival until next year’s Galaxy S25.

That’s a major shift for Samsung, and while the extra time may let it present a more polished product, we also wonder if it will start to lead to a situation where more new One UI features are instead positioned as features of the new flagship hardware — with exclusivity following. Perhaps that’s getting ahead of ourselves, but this is definitely uncharted waters for Samsung.