Android 10 on Samsung phones kills Google Daydream and we didn't even notice

By now, most flagship Samsung phones from the Samsung Galaxy S9 series and later should have Android 10. Unfortunately, people with those phones who want to continue using their Google Daydream hardware will need to downgrade back to Android 9 Pie, as Android 10 breaks Daydream support for Samsung phones.

The error has been an ongoing problem since at least February of this year. Threads on Samsung’s official forums, as well as XDA Developers and Reddit, have been seeing posts since then, but Samsung has yet to fix the problem.

To be clear, this doesn’t appear to be an Android 10 problem. Google’s own Pixel devices have no problem running Daydream apps even on Android 10. From the looks of it, this appears to be a relatively simple problem with a missing flag in Samsung’s version of Android 10. All Samsung would likely need to do is fix that flag and Daydream would work again.

Google Daydream is now a dead product though, as Google killed it off late last year. It’s possible that Samsung is not giving the issue much priority since the product line is no longer active and there was such little adoption of it even when it was still in development. Even us here at Android Authority had no idea this Android 10 issue on Samsung phones existed until we were tipped on the problem by a reader.

We reached out to Samsung to get some information on the problem but it didn’t have a comment for us at press time.

Are you a Samsung phone owner who can’t use your Daydream because of the Android 10 upgrade? Sound off in the comments below and, hopefully, this problem will be fixed soon.