A huge wave of credible One UI 8.5 leaks have now provided us with our best picture yet of how Samsung will be leveling up the Galaxy S26 experience. The early builds being dissected by Android sleuths with veteran eyes present significant upgrades in privacy, calls, search, design and even accessibility — the sorts of everyday quality-of-life touches that can make a flagship handset feel fresh before you even open that camera app.
Private Display May Change Our Idea of Screen Privacy
The most headline-grabbing addition is an experimental Private Display mode that supposedly reduces viewing angles so nosy people can’t easily see your screen. This seems to align with a rumored “Flex Magic” screen, and could be a feature saved for the Ultra if it includes new hardware. If Samsung can pull this off without sullying color or brightness, it’d be quite a coup: Traditional privacy screen protectors are one of my great tech bugbears — they tend to shave hundreds of nits (a measure of luminance) from a display, and oh the fingerprints.
Context matters here. Likewise, Samsung’s latest display strides — I’m talking about things like the S24 Ultra’s claimed 2,600-nit peak and reduction of reflections — prove that it’s not afraid to deal with challenging optics problems. Of course, pixel-level control over viewing angle is notoriously tricky. If One UI 8.5 allows you to pick “privacy levels” in real time that vary which side of the screen is limited, it might be first software-first option that doesn’t feel like a cop-out while on an airplane or while carpooling with friends.
Automatic Call Screening Comes To Galaxy
One of the other highlights is automatic call screening, a long-held Pixel perk, making its way to Samsung’s dialer. The feature would suss out questionable calls with an AI agent and surface context before you even answered the phone. The moment seems ripe: Americans received over 55 billion robocalls last year, according to the YouMail Robocall Index. If Samsung can bring this to a broad audience (and not keep it limited to regional availability), it would be a genuine, everyday protector against spam and scams.
The wish list item? Extending screening to VoIP apps. Outside the United States, a lot of calls go through WhatsApp, Telegram and Line. There should be a system-wide hook for third-party call stacks, then this would go all the way globally and not just on the carrier-call fix.
Smarter Search Baked Into the Galaxy Launcher
One UI’s home launcher appears to be gaining a global “ask an AI” shortcut, early strings suggest, with providers including Gemini and Perplexity along with Samsung’s in-house Gauss. And it’s in line with what we’ve seen from the likes of Xiaomi’s HyperOS and more recent OxygenOS releases — a mix of on-device results and with-a-little-help-from-the-cloud answers.
The challenge here will be sidestepping search-bar sprawl and translating the experience into something that feels genuinely unified — device, apps and web alike!
If Samsung can integrate fast local results with reliable summaries and follow-up actions (open a setting, toggle a smart home device, find a file) without making you hop between assistants, it will minimize friction where it matters most: the first search bar you poke at.
A Tighter Look For One UI That Lets You Keep Control
Leaks also indicate an aesthetic refresh: smaller settings, trimmed subtitles, a bottom-anchored search field, and the infamous floating back affordance, of course, will draw inevitable iOS comparisons.
More intriguing, Samsung seems to be testing an even more modular Quick Settings interface with resizable tiles — a concept that adheres to Google’s Material Design shifts and a bigger benefit for one-handed reach on large displays. Usability research from the likes of the Nielsen Norman Group has long come down on the side of controls being positioned at the bottom for ergonomics; Samsung appears to have been listening.
Power users needn’t panic. Samsung’s Good Lock suite is still the great equalizer, consistently delivering customization knobs you won’t see in stock Android. If Good Lock doesn’t allow you to dial the look back around to classic One UI or all the way into whatever you, personally, consider “new,” then it’s a legacy of wasted potential.
Quality Of Life Tweaks Power Users Will Notice
Auto Blocker — Samsung’s feature that blocks unauthorized applications and USB commands — might gain a timed pause. That is, you could sideload or temporarily ADB for a short window and have protection auto-restore — not a perfect solution, but an intelligent compensation that matches similar safety-first politics we’ve seen recently in Play Protect.
In accessibility, One UI 8.5 is rumored to be able to detect flashing lights when watching videos and dim the screen automatically. That’s not merely thoughtful; it’s consequential. Approximately 3% of people with epilepsy are photosensitive, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. On-device analysis that can moderate harmful sequences might prevent real harm, especially when creators or platforms overlook warnings.
Finally, for a bit of speculation: OneDrive backup integration in Samsung Gallery could be scrapped in favor of a Samsung-built solution or more robust Google Photos support. Samsung simply sunsetted parts of its Samsung Cloud Gallery sync three years ago, in most markets, and leaned heavily on Microsoft’s service; reversing course would be a huge development. Whatever comes next has two criteria to avoid the backlash: seamless migration, and pricing that doesn’t feel like you’re being taxed all over again for the memories you’ve collected.
What This Means for the Galaxy S26 Experience
For historical context, Samsung has launched One UI landmarks on new S-series devices and pushed that to a wide array of others later. We would expect the Galaxy S26 will debut the vast majority of these high-end enhancements on release (with “Private Display” potentially being one of those Ultra-exclusive showpieces … if it requires new panel tech)! The rest — automatic call screening, a smarter launcher, the redesigned UI and the accessibility and security tweaks — reads like meaningful platform-level polish that will age well across devices.
Given the extended software support commitments Samsung has been making with recent flagships, these One UI 8.5 changes will not just have an impact on day one — they will compound over years. If the leaks are true, the S26 won’t be about one glitzy AI demo. Instead, it’ll be about dozens of smart, humane touches that quietly make a premium phone feel like it’s worth the upgrade.