Both Google’s Daily Hub and Samsung’s Now Brief promise a single glance at your day—weather, calendar, content, and device signals—rather than hopscotching between a dozen different apps. In practice, neither comes anywhere close to living up to that vision. Rollout of Daily Hub has already been put on hold, and Now Brief, while being put out to a wider audience, still feels like a prototype dressed up in production clothes.
The idea is worth pursuing. Data. ai), indicates that people use approximately nine apps on a daily basis, and dscout’s study famously discovered users touch their phones thousands of times every day. A truly smart daily brief might even save some time, _cut down cognitive load, and ensure the lock screen and home screen remain legitimately helpful_. What we have now is neither smart nor consistently useful.
Is It Open? That May Matter More Than Novelty
Google buries Daily Hub under the Discover feed, but you can enable a homescreen shortcut via At a Glance. It’s not in the app drawer and rarely front and center. That makes it something you search for, not something that discovers you — the very opposite of what a morning briefing is supposed to do.
Samsung gets placement right. Now, it’s faster to access with the introduction of Brief on the lock screen through the Now Bar, and its continued presence on the home screen as a widget and a swipe away within the Edge Panel. This shows respect for glanceability—the heart of Google’s own Material Design guidelines—and is in line with common usability principles advocated by the likes of the Nielsen Norman Group: the most important gets to be the easiest.
Control vs. No Control Yet Consistency
Daily Hub introduced virtually no customizations initially. Google chooses the cards that are available to appear — weather, travel, calendar, reminders, and so on, and so on — and users can’t meaningfully tune how that mix is served up or reorder priorities. The undraggable brief just isn’t one that you habituate to.
And now Brief, at least, reveals toggles: news, wearable battery, gallery memories, smart home alerts and more.
The problem is reliability. All too often those modules do not populate as promised. One day, you might see weather and calendar in addition to a scattershot of YouTube recommendations, and other “enabled” sections show little or nothing at all. Control is good; control over inconsistent content is not.
Overviews that skip the basics
Calendar is table stakes. Daily Hub shows only the next few events, so you get pushed into Google Calendar for further information. Now Brief presents you with a fuller day view in a single tap, which is the right model for an at-a-glance digest.
Weather is similarly uneven. The Daily Hub frequently displays nothing but the current temperature. Now Brief generally appends a same-day forecast and context — such as a warning of rain or storms — so that you can decide whether you’ll need an umbrella without opening a second app.
Audio is another whiff; “Daily Listen,” a short, AI-generated audio takeover from Google that never graduated from Labs, is missing here, and there’s no native audio readout of your brief. Samsung does include a simple voice readout as well, which seems trivial but isn’t when your hands are full and you’re getting ready.
Recommendations: Google just nicks it, and there are no alternatives for users
Daily Hub’s content recommendations are generally more suited to me, in part because they presumably piggyback on Discover signals and my YouTube history. A quick swipe-to-refresh helps. But Google over-relies on video; sponsored or low-value clips sneak in, and recommendations of great articles are buried. There is no easy way to set interests or filter by language.
Samsung struggles with account context. In a multi-user or family scenario, Now Brief can echo someone else’s viewing history (an express lane to obsolescence). You still have no direct control over news sources, topics or languages. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report has consistently demonstrated that a sense of control and source transparency underlie trust; both briefs underdeliver on both.
Where the AI actually is — and isn’t
For something being sold under the Gemini and Galaxy AI brand, these briefs contain very few signs of intelligence. There’s very little third-party app depth, no apparent priority logic, and no real sensing of context. A “smart” short with time to learn that your 8 a.m. stand-up is more important than last night’s playlist, impede rain on your commute, summarize overnight emails and surface battery status for the things you’re taking out the door.
The supreme irony is that both ecosystems already have the pieces to make them go. Google Assistant Routines and Bixby Routines are capable of some context-aware actions; neither fuels a truly adaptive daily digest here. What’s lacking is orchestration and a clear ranking — why this card, why now, and how does today differ from yesterday?
What needs to change for these to stick?
First, universal access: lock screen, widget, and a distinct place in the app drawer. Give users real knobs — sources, topics, languages, quiet hours, and card order — and a feedback loop (“show me less like this”) that actually trains the model.
Third, expand integrations, with a clear developer API and privacy guardrails, and with on-device processing wherever feasible. Fourth, provide real utility: an offline-ready summary, an optional audio digest and dependable full-day calendar and weather details. Finally, explain why items appear. Google and Samsung like to talk about transparency with respect to AI ethics; practice it here and build trust.
If you have to pick between the two today, Samsung’s Now Brief wins for visibility and the main day overview; Google’s Daily Hub offers cleaner recommendations and a slightly smoother feed refresh. But neither is sticky enough to be a substitute for individual apps. Until these things get glanceable and truly personal, they are what they are today: half-baked sidekicks to far smarter phones.