One UI 9 is skipping my favorite Android 17 feature

The One UI 9 beta is in full swing for the Galaxy S26 series, and while there aren’t many major updates, there are some nice quality-of-life changes to look forward to. Seeing as One UI 9 is based on Android 17, it’s natural to assume that most, if not all, of the updates Google made to Android would be here as well.

That isn’t the case, and unfortunately, One UI 9 is missing one of my favorite Android 17 features.

In 2019, Google added Smart Replies to Android. The concept is great — your phone suggests responses in a notification so you can reply quickly without typing. The problem has always been the execution. When you tap a smart reply, it sends right away, without giving you a chance to edit the message, add anything extra, or fix it if you’ve sent the wrong one.

As you can see in the screenshots above, taken on my Pixel 10 Pro, Google changed that behavior in Android 17. In Android 17, tapping one of the suggested responses inputs the text for you but leaves you to make changes or send it. I was happy to see this, given that 99% of my interactions with this feature have been accidental, sending responses that mean the opposite of what I intended.

Unfortunately, as you can see in the screen recording, One UI 9 hasn’t implemented this change. So, whenever I use a Samsung phone, I must resist my fat-fingered nature and tap the button I want very carefully. Otherwise, I may mistakenly agree to go to a salad bar, and that would be a miserable experience for all involved.

There are some Android 17 features that don’t make sense for Samsung to implement. Bubbles, for example, are nowhere near as functional as Samsung’s pop-up windows. The tweaked Smart Reply behavior isn’t one of them, and I’m disappointed that it’s missing in One UI 9. I know it’s a tiny, almost insignificant change, but they’re often the ones that make more of a difference than you’d expect. Samsung and Google have been best of friends lately, with so many Gemini and other Android features coming to Samsung phones before they reach Pixels and devices from other manufacturers.

With One UI updates becoming more delayed and less significant, I’m starting to remember how things were in the TouchWiz days. That might be a bit of an exaggeration now, but if things continue to decline as they have since One UI 7 was released, it won’t be long before things are that bad again.