One UI 7 Beta 3 unexpectedly removes useful Now Bar options, but hope remains

Samsung has just released One UI 7 Beta 3 to eligible Galaxy S24 phones yesterday, January 6. However, it's not all new features and enhancements coming with the software update. Apparently, the company has also included a temporary feature downgrade with One UI 7 Beta 3: the Now Bar is getting a little downgrade.

The Now Bar is somewhat similar to Apple's Dynamic Island and it is designed to display key information from apps at a glance. Before this beta arrived, the Now Bar supported Live Notifications for several apps, including the Clock app, Emergency Sharing, Bixby, Interpreter, Samsung Health, Maps, Voice Recorder, and Samsung Notes.

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With One UI 7 Beta 3, most of these options have been removed. Now, the Now Bar only shows Interprereter, Clock, and Emergency Sharing Live Notifications, as you can see in this screenshot:



The change was first noticed by a beta user who posted a complaint on Samsung's US community forums. The complaint got a response from a Samsung beta moderator, indicating that the change is not a bug, but instead an "intentional refinement".

Luckily, the moderator also said that the features will be more available once the official version is out, and after Samsung's made improvements to them. The moderator doesn't specify exactly what improvements Samsung has in store, though.

The moderator also adds that the Now Bar is still being tweaked with the beta version of One UI 7. It's highly likely that Samsung will bring back the missing Live Notification options, and they are likely to also be improved when the stable One UI 7 hits eligible phones.

The stable version of One UI 7 will be launched alongside the Galaxy S25 phones. The Unpacked event when we'll officially meet the Galaxy S25 trio is now scheduled for January 22, so save the date!

I don't believe that Samsung will permanently remove these Live Notifications, so you have no reason to worry about it right now. We'll see how things look like with the official One UI 7, so we'll have to be a little bit more patient to know for sure, but to me, it seems likely they're just temporarily removed in Beta 3.