Samsung Experience 9.0 beta brings Android 8.0 Oreo to Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus

By Christian de Looper Published November 2, 2017

Samsung is launching an update to its flagship phones. The company has announced the Samsung Experience 9.0 beta, a big part of the Samsung beta program that allows those that are members of it to experience some of the new features in the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem.

Along with Samsung Experience 9.0 comes Android 8.0 Oreo — as Experience 9.0 is built on the Oreo user interface and design. In other words, this marks the beginning of the road to rolling out Android 8.0 Oreo to Samsung’s customers. To start, the Experience 9.0 beta will be available to users of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus in South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Of course, more users will get the beta as time goes on.

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It’s important to note that this is a beta — in other words, you’ll only get it if you’re a part of the beta program, and it may still have some bugs. Still, at the very least this shows that Samsung is well on its way to updating its phones to the newest version of Android.

Samsung Experience is essentially the user interface that Samsung builds over the top of Android. The software was previously known as Samsung TouchWiz, but was rebranded towards the end of 2016. Why? It’s anyone’s guess, but TouchWiz did have some issues with branding considering it was known as having a ton of bloatware and annoying Samsung apps. Experience seems to mark an effort by Samsung to cut down on the bloatware, or at the very least allow customers to hide it. That’s a good thing — the majority of people tend to stick with Google’s stock apps rather than adopt the different apps of different manufacturers, save for key apps like the camera app or email app.

We’ll have to wait and see how long it takes Samsung to tweak the beta and launch Experience 9.0 to all customers beyond just those who are part of the beta program. Hopefully it won’t be more than a month or so, and hopefully the company will soon launch new software on other phones such as the Galaxy Note 8, which we think probably should have been included in this first rollout. Still, it remains to be seen how many differences there really are between Experience 8.5 and Experience 9.0.

Christian de Looper

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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