Samsung’s Now Bar is one of the most attractive features of One UI 7. The pill-shaped interface on the lock screen and dynamically adjusts based on the most important activities on your phone, much like the iPhone’s Dynamic Island. The feature, however, looks a bit under-cooked on foldables, especially Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip series phones, being limited to only the internal screen. Thankfully, Samsung is working to fix this, though the patch may take some time.
The fix supposedly comes not as part of the existing One UI 7 but Samsung’s next platform upgrade — One UI 8 based on Android 16. An account by the username @Gamer0mega on social media X shared a video preview of Now Bar in action. Instead of the inner screen, the clip shows Now Bar running on the cover screen of a Galaxy Z Flip 6 or Flip 5.
The clip also cycles through multiple Now Bar tiles on the cover screen and demonstrates launching the music player. This signifies the video has good chances of being legit, though as with almost everything else we witness on the web, there’s never absolute certainty.
While the wait for One UI 8 may be long, it will likely not be as long as other version upgrades. Samsung’s delayed roll out of One UI 7 — and the scathing criticism it has had to endure while fixing bugs in the beta phase — has reportedly inspired it to leap directly from One UI 7 to One UI 8 without a usual mid-cycle 7.1 update. So, instead of arriving with the Galaxy S26 series next year, One UI 8 is speculated to come earlier, possibly as early as August 2025.
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the firmware upgrade comes with the launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7. But with the lack of time, Samsung is unlikely to focus on bringing many radical changes to One UI, especially with aesthetics. One UI 6 and 7 have dramatically improved how the interface looks, and One UI 8 is expected to focus on an optimized user experience.
Tushar is a freelance writer at Digital Trends and has been contributing to the Mobile Section for the past three years…
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