At its Unpacked event today,Samsung announced the latest generation of its Galaxy S smartphones. The Galaxy S24 series is, true to form for present-day Samsung, a very minor improvement over last year’s S23 phones. The headlining new features are an abundance of AI-powered tricks and a trendy titanium frame for the S24 Ultra. But the most interesting thing about the new phones isn’t really a new hardware or software feature — it’s that Samsung is committing to seven full years of OS and security updates.
Samsung once led the Android space when it comes to updates, offering four years of OS updates and five years of security patches for many of its devices. Google upstaged Samsung with last year’sPixel 8series, which comprised the first Android phones sold on the promise of an even longer update timeline of seven years, for both feature and security updates. Samsung’s new update commitment matches Google’s: the Galaxy S24 should, in theory, have access to up-to-date builds of Android and One UI until early 2031.
Seven full years of software support would match Google’s latest update commitments, and while Apple doesn’t explicitly define how long its phones get iOS updates, it should make Galaxy phones more than competitive with iPhones in terms of longevity: the oldest phone to see the latest iOS 17 is the iPhone XR, released in late 2018 (five-plus years ago).
This new software support timeline is being positioned as an environmentally friendly move, letting people hold onto their S24 phones for alongtime without sacrificing new features or, more importantly, critical security updates. Whether it’ll be practical or even possible to use a Galaxy S24 into the next decade remains to be seen, but assuming Samsung makes good on its promise, software support won’t be the bottleneck there.
Samsung Galaxy S24
The Galaxy S24 series are Samsung’s first phones to offer a full seven years of OS and security updates, matching Google’s impressive commitment in the Pixel 8 series.
