Samsung is testing a gentle prodding that might make you a more attentive son, daughter or sibling. In the newest One UI 8.5 beta, certain Galaxy owners are seeing a prompt that lets them know how long it’s been since they’ve reached out to a family member—and recommends making contact again.
What Beta Testers Are Seeing in One UI 8.5
Early testers say the reminder is popping up in Samsung’s Now Brief and Now Bar, two surfaces for showing you timely, context-aware information. There’s a card that will tell you, in no uncertain terms, how many days have passed since your most recent call or message with one of the family contacts — complete with an easy way to engage or Not Now it away.
Screenshots that have been shared by popular Galaxy fans over at X even show counters like 22 and 26 days beside near relatives. The tone itself is soft rather than scolding, but the message works: It’s been a while — maybe reach out.
How Samsung Might Define Who Counts As Family
Samsung has not explained what the reasoning is, but there are a few potential signals. Relationship labels (like Mom or Dad) and groups — they’re probably where you’d first think to look for such information — are supported by Apple’s Contacts app. The system could also deduce relationships from how you tag people or from contact nicknames synced with other services, all while performing everything on-device.
Equally important is recency. The prompt keeps good tabs on your last interaction, so it’s definitely looking at call logs and message metadata to determine “days since.” Less about who you love most, more about who needs to hear from you lately. Ideally, Samsung would let users manually curate which contacts count and set up custom thresholds (key for making sure you don’t receive awkward pings about far-off relatives or work contacts with family-style nicknames).
Why Nudges Like This Can Be Important for Connection
Small prompts can change behavior. Behavioral science research around “nudges” suggests that low-friction prompts at the right moment can significantly move routines without feeling too heavy-handed. Between the two, social connection is not only pleasant but also health boosting: A pioneering meta-analysis led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University found that people with stronger social relationships have a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival across studies.
Tech companies have already welled to this playbook. Google’s Digital Wellbeing nudges and features like Instagram’s “You’re all caught up” shift usage in useful ways. Samsung’s twist is more personal: Instead of fixating on time spent staring at a screen, it focuses on your real-life support network. If it’s done thoughtfully — private, opt-in and in your control — it could indeed be one of the rare elements of today’s smartphone app that actually makes your day a little better.
Privacy and Control Questions for These Family Prompts
For any context-aware feature the first questions are what data it uses, where is that data processed and how one might turn it off. Since these prompts are built on call and message metadata, transparency will be key. Transparent options to turn the feature off or block certain contacts, and determine how frequently a prompt hits, would help. On-device processing should be the default so we can maintain the confidentiality of sensitive relationship patterns.
Tone matters, too. A warm, dismissible prompt is helpful; a relentless banner can do the opposite. The current beta text falls on the right side of that line, and the Not Now button suggests you recognized it was happening. Samsung will have to maintain that balance as the feature takes shape.
More One UI 8.5 Tweaks in the Works for Galaxy Phones
The family reminder isn’t the sole quality-of-life upgrade that testers have seen. A torch indicator in the Now Bar makes it easy to see and control your torch settings. There’s also a new toggle that you can flip if too many apps in your phone abuse ads, and refinements to power-saving settings which should both stretch the battery life without having to pump the brakes on performance too hard.
Individually, these are small changes. Together, they add up to a One UI update dedicated to reducing friction and surfacing the correct micro-actions at the right time — whether that’s turning off the torch you left on or taming noisy apps or pinging your parent that you didn’t mean to blow off.
When You May See It on Your Galaxy Device or Not
The feature is already showing up for some beta users, especially among the latest Galaxy flagships. Like all prerelease software, it can very well change or even disappear before the stable version. If it does stick, expect to see it as part of Now Brief and Now Bar in One UI 8.5’s rollout, depending on regional availability and who gets the feature rolled out first with server-side flags.
Until then, the takeaway is straightforward: The world’s most common gadget could soon serve to maintain your world’s most crucial relationships. And if you were looking for a sign to do so, take this as your nudge.
