Galaxy S23 owners say Samsung did them dirty by leaving out this feature in the One UI 8.5 update

Samsung recently began to be implemented One UI 8.5 stable update for older flagships including the Galaxy S23 series. With the update, owners of the Galaxy S23 series and other eligible devices Receive improvements like a more customizable quick settings menu, lock screen customization options, more visually consistent system menus, useful new Galaxy AI features, and much more. Another key feature Samsung is bringing to certain top-tier devices is the ability to share files with Apple devices via AirDrop, a feature Google first introduced on Pixel phones last year. But in the process, Samsung has also upset users who do not receive this feature, even though their phones’ hardware meets the requirements.

Several Galaxy S23 owners are furious about the lack of AirDrop support on their devices and many of them have taken online forumsincluding Reddit, to express their frustration. Users, including Redditor Great salary9046They allege this is part of “planned obsolescence,” a tactic brands are often accused of using to shorten the lifespan of devices by intentionally limiting features and performance and encouraging owners to upgrade sooner.

While expressing his dissatisfaction, Big-Salary9046 also explains why it makes little sense for Samsung to skip AirDrop support for the Galaxy S23. The user claims that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 powering the Galaxy S23 can run the underlying stack that allows Android devices to connect to AirDrop.

Essentially, Apple Wireless Direct Link (or AWDL), the protocol that powers AirDrop, requires Wi-Fi radio on the sending and receiving devices to split the transfer into small packets and change Wi-Fi channels fast enough (hundreds or thousands of times per second) to keep the peer-to-peer transfer active without disconnecting from the Internet. Therefore, the Wi-Fi module can be a bottleneck if it is not powerful enough.

However, the Redditor claims that the chipset supports Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800 system, which is capable of Wi-Fi 7 transfers, and there is no reason for it to be missing when interacting with AWDL. Although it makes reasonable sense, we were unable to verify the claims ourselves. What makes sense is that Google would need to work with multiple chip vendors to ensure the feature works on a wider range of devices, as each needs to be tweaked and tested separately.

While the lack of support is causing outrage, Google and Samsung are unlikely to change their stance. The Galaxy S23 is already excluded from the list of Galaxy devices getting AirDrop functionalityand a possible explanation could be the requirement to dedicate additional resources to support older devices.

The second option is to use a third-party application, such as Near fallalthough it may be restricted to certain platforms, such as macOS.

In the meantime, we have written to Samsung asking for more clarity on why it decided to exclude the Galaxy S23 and will update this article once we receive a response.