I can’t express the annoyance I have felt with Samsung’s handling of One UI 7. Someone said I shouldn’t be frustrated by Samsung’s tardiness since the delay meant it was taking care of bugs, and I’d still complain if they brought a bug-filled update. That’s fair. But major bugs aren’t a given, and other OEMs managed to avoid such a situation entirely.
We finally got the South Korean manufacturer to give us an official timeline, and unsurprisingly, its flagship releases of 2024 were first in line. The rollout started for the S24 series and 6th-gen foldables on April 7th, but within a week, all of those phones had their rollout halted due to serious bugs. Yeah, this isn’t looking good.
Despite Months of Development, One UI 7 Rollout for 2024 Flagships Has Been Paused
One UI 7 is Samsung’s Android 15-based OS. The company has never been the most prompt when it comes to delivering updates, and even Google wasn’t the first to ship Android 15 to its phones this year, so there was a lot of slack being cut for other manufacturers. However, the unofficial expectation was that every serious OEM would have its take on Android 15 ready before the end of 2024.
Sadly, Samsung didn’t seem to share that sentiment. Or perhaps it did, but failed miserably at showing it. Android 15 was open to manufacturers from August, hit AOSP in early September, and Google Pixels got it a month after that. Even if I want to be generous and start Samsung’s timer from when Google’s phones got it, it’s still a full six-month delay. Samsung has been far from prompt.
So, when the manufacturer finally made the rollout schedule official, we were all extremely excited. After all, a lot of good things have been said about One UI 7, plus it brings many major UI updates, so that’s nice too. Unfortunately, just a week after the S24 series, the Z Fold 6, and the Z Flip 6 began to receive the update, there has been yet another setback.
First, Samsung pulled down its update for the Galaxy S24 and the Galaxy S24+ globally, indicating that there was a pretty big issue with both. The Galaxy S24 Ultra seemed to be unaffected by whatever the problem was. Now, according to Tarun Vats, all devices, including the Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6, have had their updates pulled from Samsung’s servers in the US, Europe, or South Korea.
It is obvious that for a stable release to be proven to be “unstable” as such, there has to have been some kind of bug or vulnerability behind the situation. According to Ice Universe on X, it does seem to be a bug at fault, particularly relating to unlocking the device. That’s definitely a serious enough issue to lead to this situation.
The folks at SamMobile also discovered that Secure Folder on the new OS is capable of “exposing” media through what’s meant to be a secure iteration of the Gallery app. The Gallery is capable of generating stories using your photos and videos, and will then send a notification to view it, which is entirely accessible outside of Secure Folder. That’s a massive issue, especially since it doesn’t even require you to do anything covert.
Samsung has had several months and several betas, so it is pretty head-scratching that bugs of this magnitude somehow flew under the radar. It certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence.
