Summary

  • One UI 8 is in early development for Galaxy S25, starting sooner than usual.
  • The first test build for Android 16-based One UI 8 has been spotted on Samsung’s servers.
  • If development continues without delay, One UI 8 may be stable by late summer 2025.

Android 15-based One UI 7 is Samsung’s latest smartphone software, and it’s currently exclusive to the Galaxy S25 series. This week, Samsung announced that One UI 7 will begin rolling out to other devices beginning in April. Despite One UI 7’s slow progress, Android 16-based One UI 8 is apparently already in testing. Samsung leaker Tarun Vats tweeted today that the first internal test build of One UI 8 has shown up on Samsung’s servers.

According to Vats, development on One UI 8 has started two months earlier than normal, and the software is currently in testing on the Samsung Galaxy S25. That makes sense, considering Android 16 — which, again, is the foundation of One UI 8 — is itself arriving ahead of the typical Android release schedule, in June. Additionally, last month, leaker Ice Universe tweeted that One UI 8 would “arrive sooner than previously thought.”

A headshot of Sameer Samat, Google's President of the Android ecosystem


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9

One UI 8: Coming this summer?

The Samsung Galaxy S25 on a desk, showing its quick settings panel.

With the exception of One UI 7, annual One UI updates typically debut in the fall: stable One UI 6 hit the S23 in October 2023; One UI 5 arrived on the S22 series in October 2022. If One UI 8 is beginning development two months ahead of time, assuming there aren’t any major delays, we could potentially see it in stable late this summer.

Thanks: Moshe