Samsung officially rolling out Android 12 on Galaxy S21 today, less than a month after Google Pixel

Ben Schoon | Nov 15 2021 - 3:00 am PT

After a couple of months in beta, Samsung is officially rolling out Android 12 to the Galaxy S21 series in a stable, wide rollout. This comes in record time, less than 30 days after the update rolled out to Pixel smartphones.

Samsung first kicked off its Android 12 Beta program on the Galaxy S21, S21+, and S21 Ultra in mid-September. In the time since, four updates have been made available to beta testers, with the stable rollout bringing the features and bug fixes from those updates to all users globally.

Meanwhile, Google released Android 12 to AOSP in September, but the update wasn’t made available for Pixel phones until mid-October. Samsung, which used to be notorious for slow updates, is one of the first Android OEMs to adopt Android 12 in a stable update. Other big names, such as Oppo and OnePlus, are still beta testing the update.

Android 12 comes in the form of One UI 4.0 on Samsung devices and brings with it many of the changes we saw on Pixels. That includes better privacy controls with indicators for microphone/camera use, the ability to only give apps your approximate location, and better permissions options. There’s also a new Privacy Dashboard that shows which apps have been using permissions on your phone.

Samsung also adopts Dynamic Color in Android 12 on the Galaxy S21, a feature that can automatically pull colors from your wallpaper and apply those colors to various system accents and compatible apps. Some of Samsung’s stock apps have been redesigned to better fit Android 12, while widgets also received a fresh coat of paint. On the homescreen, icons can now be tuned to fit dark mode better, too.

One UI 4.0 starts rolling out first on the Galaxy S21, S21+, and S21 Ultra today, November 15. Over the coming months, Samsung has confirmed it will update at least two dozen other smartphones and tablets to Android 12. You can learn more about that here.