Joe Maring / Android Authority
Samsung’s One UI 8.5 beta just dropped, promising to fix our cluttered lock screens and plenty more. It runs on Android 16 QPR2, bringing with it a bunch of fresh features to Galaxy devices. The update might still be in beta, but I went ahead and installed it on my Galaxy S25 Ultra to see what all the fuss is about.
I tend to drift in and out of Samsung’s ecosystem, but One UI 8.5 adds a few smart touches that make the OS feel refreshed, even for casual users. Here are the features that impressed me most so far.
What do you think of One UI 8.5 beta so far? 149 votes Love it! It looks like a great update. 38 % It's good, but there's room for improvement. 24 % It's okay, I don't see anything special. 23 % I'm not impressed by what I've seen. 15 %
Even more customization
One UI 8.0 marked a new era of customization for Samsung’s mobile OS, and the 8.5 beta pushes it even further. The Quick Settings panel now gives you more freedom than ever to configure various control widgets — resizing tiles, reordering them, even stripping the panel down to the bare essentials. With the expanded, configurable layout, it’s surprisingly easy to sculpt the panel into something that actually feels like mine. For the first time in ages, I didn’t even bother putting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth at the top, just because I could.
That said, I could live with the insipid Liquid Glass theming, the Apple-esque pastel gradients strewn throughout apps, and those occasional white pill-shaped docks that run counter to One UI’s traditionally brighter, more playful personality. The 8.5 beta doesn’t radically change the look from 8.0, but the writing’s on the wall: if Apple does it, Samsung will eventually follow. Still, the mix of squircles and those buttery-smooth animations feels just distinct enough to keep One UI interesting— even for someone like me, who bounces in and out of the Galaxy ecosystem.
One smaller but no less thoughtful change is how One UI now uses AI to automatically shift your wallpaper so the lock-screen clock and widgets don’t sit right on top of your pets or the people you actually like. It’s not some fancy depth-based 3D trick; just a simple adjustment to the wallpaper’s size and crop. But honestly, anything that saves me from the fiddly ritual of nudging and recropping wallpapers to get them “just right” is a win in my book.
Better battery management
No one likes micromanaging their phone’s battery life. But if you’re going to do it, it’s nice to have the right tools to do it right, and One UI 8.5 introduces some genuinely useful ones.
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