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I now firmly believe that the best thing about Samsung's One UI 9 rollout is not its speed
The pace at which Samsung has updated so many high-end and mid-range phones to One UI 9 in recent weeks is certainly impressive, but another thing might be even more remarkable.
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
The Galaxy A36 is just one of the many Samsung phones capable of running stable One UI 9 already. | Image by PhoneArena
Have you received your official Android 17-based One UI 9 update? The number of PhoneArena readers that were likely to answer that question with a "yes" just two or three weeks ago has probably multiplied by hundreds or thousands in the meantime, as Samsung impressively ramped up the global rollout of its latest collection of UI tweaks and performance enhancements following a pretty hesitant start.
But as quickly as the world's top smartphone vendor undeniably boosted your general satisfaction levels with the pace and scale of its stable One UI 9 deliveries for devices as diverse as the Galaxy S26 family, S24 series, S23 line, Z Fold 5, Z Flip 5, Galaxy A36, A37, and A56, there seems to be something (important) about these updates that users are appreciating even more.
The One UI 9 bugs aren't anywhere near as serious as you may have expected
That's at least what a recent PhoneArena reader poll strongly suggests, as a cool 28 percent or so of respondents say they've experienced "absolutely no problems" while installing the new software update and after trying it on for size on their eligible devices.
Have you had any problems running One UI 9?
575 Votes
Obviously, these answers aren't vetted in any way, so some of you might be lying about the stability of Samsung's latest One UI version to make your favorite brand look better in the public eye, but I really don't want to believe so many of you would do such a thing.
Besides, it's pretty clear from browsing Samsung's Community forums and both the general Samsung Galaxy and One UI-focused subreddits that the bugs discovered in recent weeks are for the most part relatively minor and not very widespread. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, at least as far as the impact of certain glitches is concerned, but for a rollout that started off so slowly and hesitantly, the Android 17-based update appears to be surprisingly harmless and smooth for the vast majority of early adopters.
One issue might need a little attention
... and it's not the one you're probably thinking of if you closely followed our extensive One UI 9 coverage these last few weeks. While undeniably serious, the (still) mysterious bug that didn't allow certain owners of devices like the Galaxy S24, S24 Ultra, S26 Ultra, and Galaxy A57 to actually use their phones for, well, anything after installing One UI 9 is clearly a less frequent occurrence than battery drain issues.
This is another finding of our survey that seems to largely coincide with the general sentiment on Reddit, where a bunch of threads have accumulated dozens of recent reports of unexpectedly low battery endurance times on One UI 9-running phones.
Once again, we're not talking about very widespread global issues here, but battery drain appears to be a slightly bigger problem for a larger number of users than the individual bug mentioned above, some "general sluggishness", or other smaller unspecified glitches. Should Samsung look into how One UI 9 is impacting the battery life of some of its best phones right now? I think so.
The update is still not as ubiquitous as I thought
While most people who've switched from One UI 8 to version 9 seem happy with the move, the largest number of survey respondents have yet to receive the major new update.
What do you think is the most important thing about a software update?
5 Votes
This means Samsung still has a lot of work to do on the distribution front as well, which I don't doubt is exactly what's going to happen over the next few weeks. Those budget-friendly mid-rangers that joined their high-end brothers and cousins on the One UI 9 train in South Korea last week, for instance, are likely to do the same thing around the world this week, followed by many other Galaxy A-series handsets and presumably a bunch of Galaxy tablets too.
Clearly, Samsung has found the greatest balance between speed and stability of all the world's major Android smartphone manufacturers as far as this latest update is concerned, and there's really no other company that even comes close to the champion's industry standard.
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