The phones that have been updated with One UI 8 are now waiting to receive One UI 8.5. This is a mid-year software refresh from Samsung. There’s obviously plenty of time before the stable update is released, but the One UI 8.5 Beta is already in testing. The same beta firmware has just been spotted on the Galaxy A56.
Samsung had already announced that One UI 8.5 Beta is under development for the Galaxy S26 series. They might be trying to shoot two birds with one stone. It’s plausible that the Galaxy A56 has also been silently added to the beta program. But there’s no guarantee yet.
It’s bound to happen eventually, and Samsung will make the announcement later. But, for now, let’s take this news with a pinch of salt. If we had to guess, the One UI 8.5 beta program will begin proper testing on the Samsung latest 5G phone once they finish with the stable release on the Galaxy S26 lineup.
By the way, the Galaxy S25 family is already a part of beta testing. These are the current active flagship phones, so it makes sense for the One UI 8.5 beta to be tested on them. The older S24 lineup might also become privy to this One UI 8.5 update sooner than any Galaxy A model.
So what’s in the Beta update, and is it really worth waiting for? There are some Galaxy AI tweaks in One UI 8.5. Continuous image generation is one of them. Bixby has been given more control, so it can assist you better by finding the features you need just with voice commands.
Conversation history is also a big improvement for the Bixby here. Storage Share, which you usually find in third-party file managers, is now officially added to the stock My Files app. Smart View device connection is faster in this round of updates. Quick Share has photo-sharing suggestions. It also seems to avoid unwanted sharing requests on the new version.
The Home screen and lock screen are more customizable than ever on the beta OneUI 8.5 firmware. Of course, there are more clock fonts as well. Some tweaks have also been made to Samsung Health and built-in theft protection. There’s plenty more in the official changelog.
