Samsung Keyboard quietly removes YouTube, Grammarly, and Spotify extensions

Damien Wilde | Aug 2 2024 - 3:04 am PT

Grammarly in Samsung Keyboard running One UI 4.1

Samsung Keyboard appears to have quietly removed support for third-party extensions from YouTube, Grammarly, and Spotify.

According to a new report from SamMobile, the default keyboard on Samsung Galaxy phones removed some of the most popular third-party extensions potential several months ago with little to no fanfare, according to numerous Reddit posts.

What’s odd is that Grammarly was part of a function baked into One UI 4.1 that directly aided writing when using the Samsung Keyboard app. It would highlights incorrect grammar or sentence structure and give suggestions and fixes.

The Spotify extension allowed you to search for a song, album or playlist on the streaming app and link to the content within any text input field. This could be helpful if you share music with friends and family members and don’t want to go through unnecessary extra steps.

Samsung Keyboard’s YouTube extension offered something similar. Allowing you to search for songs and videos on the streaming platform and send a link without needing to open the YouTube app and share from there.

All of the extensions could be enabled from Samsung Keyboard settings, but on most accounts none of these option now appear in the backend of the app. However, the Grammarly option is still showing on my own S24 Ultra. That said, no options are showing when typing out incorrect or badly written text. It could be that the built “Writing Assistant” could be the permanent or long-term replacement for Grammarly, which is why the feature is not working and is unavailable on lots of devices.

One other theory suggests that the YouTube extension for Samsung Keyboard was able to bypass age and video content restrictions. For that reason it may have been sensible for Samsung to remove the feature if safety-related issues arose. That said, it’s not clear why these extensions have been removed or are no longer working.