If you’ve been following the One UI 9 update changelogs, you’d notice that it’s a much smaller upgrade than One UI 7, or even One UI 8, which was also an incremental update.
And for most people, there’s not enough to be excited about.
However, if you can look past the lack of extensive customization options, I think you’d find that One UI 9 is actually loaded.
You might even find some of the features genuinely worth waiting for. I have, and I’ll tell you why. And if you own a Samsung Galaxy S26, you won’t have to wait long.
One UI 9 polishes existing features
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it
One UI 9, based on Android 17, consolidates the changes Samsung introduced in earlier versions of its software skin. That means that there are no major UI changes and very few visual updates.
Samsung introduced minor adjustments to the Quick Settings menu. It made the volume and brightness sliders significantly thicker and separated the dark mode and volume mode toggles from the brightness and volume sliders, respectively.
It also added a glow effect to the media player progress bar in the notification dropdown and on the lock screen, and made the lock screen media player slicker by removing the solid box around the playback controls.
If you’re a fan of the auto-adjusting lock screen clock, One UI 9 brings the feature to the first clock font — before now, you could only use it with the second font.
Samsung also made minor tweaks to the My Files app and Settings app descriptions.
That’s about it. So, it’s no surprise people are hardly excited.
One UI 9 comes with several additional features
You might love the driving reports and internet access controls
You’d be wrong to think One UI 9 didn’t introduce any useful features just because of the dearth of visual changes.
My favorite is Driving Report. With One UI 9, connecting to your car’s Bluetooth will let your phone track your entire trip.
Following that, you can go into your settings to see several driving stats, including your speed throughout the ride, sharp turns, rapid accelerations, sudden decelerations, and so on. It’ll even show if you used your phone during the trip, and for how long.
The feature doesn’t seem limited to newer cars with Android Auto. It uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope, so connecting to your car’s head unit via Bluetooth should be enough.
As a spirited driver, I’m particularly excited to see what my graphs look like and how the AI interprets my daily and weekly journeys.
Another one I’m excited about is the network access controls.
With One UI 9, you’ll be able to restrict specific apps or app categories (customized by you) from the internet. You can even schedule start and end times for the restriction and set a password.
The closest I’ve gotten to network restriction is Bixby’s work routines, but that locks you out of the app completely.
Some apps were updated, too. Samsung Browser (formerly Samsung Internet) lets you open up to five windows that behave like individual apps.
Notes will add an option to redact text by highlighting it. When you share those notes, the redacted sections remain hidden. Also, My Files will let you open PDFs without a third-party app.
There are several other smaller inclusions, like Call Brief, which pulls your calendar, reminders, and emails onto the screen when someone calls, and the phone app, which shows Meet, WhatsApp, and Viber calls in one place, amongst several others.
One UI 9 prioritizes security updates
Not flashy, but important
Security updates are hardly exciting, but they’re important, and One UI 9 comes with a lot of them.
Before now, you could see if an app was using your microphone, camera, or location, thanks to the small green dot in the upper-right corner of the screen. But you couldn’t do anything about it.
With One UI 9, you can stop the program from using said feature. You even get a button that lets you see every app that has recently used one or more of those sensitive features, and exactly when.
From there, you can also change the app’s permissions to ask every time before using a particular feature.
Within the security settings, Samsung includes an unknown apps feature that shows all the apps you’ve installed from external sources. This lets you see and uninstall them all in one place.
One UI 9 also introduces stricter lock screen security measures. It’ll only let you input the wrong password 13 times before permanently preventing access to the device and requiring a factory reset to reuse it.
The implementation is quite clever. After the first four failed attempts, you get progressively longer lockout durations, from 30 mins after the 5th try to 24hrs after the 12th try. In total, it’ll take you 1 day, 18 hours, and 21 minutes to use all 13 attempts.
Incremental updates make sense right now
One UI 9 isn’t a massive update, and I’m okay with that. When it eventually reaches my S24 Ultra, I already know what features I’ll try out first: Driving Reports and network access controls.
However, it’s totally understandable if you’re not excited about One UI 9.
If you only live for massive customization upgrades, you don’t need to wait for Samsung’s next release, because One UI 8.5 already introduced several features through Good Lock.
