Overview
- Samsung has mostly finished rolling out One UI 9 (Android 17) to its flagship phones and foldables, with device-specific builds deployed region by region and final distributions reaching recent S23, Fold5 and newer models.
- The company’s November security stream is continuing in parallel, with the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 now receiving a November patch that fixes 179 vulnerabilities including 155 Google fixes and 24 Samsung fixes.
- Samsung’s expanded policy now guarantees seven years of OS and security updates for models starting with the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy S24, while devices released before those models remain on the prior five-year cap.
- The firm maintains a two-tier cadence of monthly security updates for most of a device’s supported life, then moves eligible models into a final-year quarterly cadence or removes them when they reach end of life, as it did earlier with the S21 removal and S22 move to quarterly.
- Tablets and wearables follow different rules: Samsung added the Galaxy Tab S12 series to the quarterly tablet list and keeps Galaxy Watches on a quarterly schedule with newer Watch 9 and Watch Ultra 2 covered for five years of updates.