It’s only been a few months since Samsung started rolling out the Android 15-based One UI 7 Stable update to its eligible Galaxy devices, but the South Korean tech giant has already started beta testing Android 16-based One UI 8. This is because it has an ambitious plan of rolling out the OS update this summer, breaking away from the tradition of releasing major Android updates in the fall.
Only time will tell whether users give One UI 8 a thumbs up, but Samsung is hard at work to add several new features and improvements to its Android skin. And thanks to the opening of the beta program for the public, we already know a lot of what’s coming to One UI 8. In addition to an enhanced Now Bar and Now Brief experience, new animation, and Call captions, it looks like One UI 8 will feature one more new feature that will make your lock screen look smart.
One UI 8’s lock screen clock can reshape to fit around the object
The idea isn’t unheard of. In fact, Apple did it in iOS 16, back in 2022, and then many other Android OEMs followed suit, except Samsung. Fans were reasonably unhappy about the missing feature and asked for it in One UI 7. Unfortunately for fans, things didn’t go as they wanted. Samsung didn’t add it to One UI 7, not because it didn’t want to, but because it wanted to do something different than Apple.
iOS 16 introduced what Apple calls “Depth Effect,” a feature that moves parts of the time display behind an object in your lock screen wallpaper, making the lock screen more 3D-like. Now, instead of copying this approach like Xiaomi and others, Samsung has come out with a completely different take.
As spotted by famed leakers @UniverseIce and @Topraks9plus, the One UI 8 has a lock screen clock that automatically detects objects on the lock screen wallpaper and adjusts its shape accordingly (via Android Authority). So, if a person’s head is right under a digit in the time display, it will only shrink the size of that digit and not the entire style. As you move the clock widget during customization, an animation shows those digits expanding or shrinking based on where you place the time display.
The feature was spotted on One UI for the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Since the One UI 8 beta program is currently open only for S25 handsets in select regions, we can’t say for sure if this will be exclusive to S25 or newer at this moment, or whether this will require specific hardware to work. But since this is part of One UI 8 – unless Samsung scraps it, of course – your Galaxy handset needs to be eligible for the update to try the feature.
