GoKawiilTL;DR Samsung announced last weekend that Quick Share support for Apple AirDrop was coming to the Galaxy s26 series.
After first getting started in South Korea, access has been expanding globally all week.
User reports now confirm that the update has hit Galaxy S26 handsets in the US.
It’s happening! Not even a week ago, we heard that Samsung was nearly ready to upgrade its brand-new Galaxy S26 lineup with support for AirDrop over Quick Share, and just a couple days later, Samsung confirmed updates would be rolling out this week. After getting started in South Korea, and spreading to markets like the UK and India, user reports now indicate that the update has hit S26 phones in the United States.
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Samsung already told us that it was committing to a pretty aggressive rollout schedule for this update. Last weekend, the company shared that while the update’s release would start off the week in its native South Korea, the plan was to get it over to the US before the week’s end. And now, ahead of schedule, US-based Galaxy S26 owners are chiming in to reply to a thread started by Reddit user Fun-Building-8146 to share news of their own updates arriving (via 9to5Google). We just checked on our own Galaxy S26 Ultra in the States, and are seeing AirDrop support, as well.
Between getting that out on time and the growing number of Galaxy devices getting access to the One UI 8.5 beta, this is shaping up to be a nicely productive week for Samsung and its mobile software efforts. Really, the only bummer about this AirDrop rollout is that the newly announced Galaxy A37 5G and Galaxy A57 5G will both arrive running One UI 8.5, but without AirDrop support.
Samsung has committed to extending this support to other, non-S26 Galaxy devices “at a later date,” but has yet to offer any more specificity about exactly what hardware that would include, nor a more precise timetable on when those updates might arrive. For now, though, grab your S26, and grab an iPhone, and feel free to go nuts sending files back and forth to your heart’s content.
If you’re wondering why you aren’t seeing AirDrop support on your own Galaxy S26 yet, check to make sure you’re running Google Play Services version 26.11.xx or newer.
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