I was in a completely dark room with the phone's brightness set to 0. While browsing through the system apps, I noticed that all the black areas were visible; the black pixels weren't turned off. It looked like on devices with TFT screens. I confirmed this by turning the screen off. The blacks are definitely not true blacks. The potential of having AMOLED panels is being completely wasted. I don't know if this is a problem specific in One UI 8.5, but I'm certain this wasn't the case before, and we did have truly true blacks. I also verified this very easily: I took a screenshot and extracted the black area. It's absolutely confirmed. The blacks are not true blacks. And this applies literally to every app and every section of the system. Just look at the photos. In contrast, all the third-party apps that use the AMOLED dark theme do have truly true blacks, as they should be.

Just try all this yourself and see for yourself...😔

First of all. As expected, this patch is just like any other. It doesn't fix a single bug, and the performance is exactly the same. The Quick Panel is still just as laggy. However, Samsung is so awful that it can't even manage to improve any of this in patches, but it does remove things. Well, it turns out they've now removed the Now Bar pill animation from the status bar. That is, the animation that appears when you exit the app and the one that pushes the notification icons next to it. Watch the video. I don't know what to expect from Samsung anymore. They're removing absolutely everything that's always been there in the A/M/F series. Since they're removing every existing animation, they might as well remove them all, or I'll just set all the animations to 0x so I don't see any.

EDIT: It seems to be a bug. The animation appeared for me. Sometimes it appears and sometimes it doesn't.

As we all know, the blur effect between the two series is different. The S series has real-time blur, while the rest is static (in the areas where it's used). However, the blur effect in the A/M/F series is literally the same in all areas as older versions of One UI, except for the Quick Panel, which received a massive nerf in One UI 8.5, making it excessively blurry and barely distinguishable in the background colors. It looks awful. In the images, you can see the differences between the current blur effects of the S series and the A/M/F series. What do you think? Do you think Samsung will bring back the blur effect we had in One UI 8.0 in One UI 9? Or is that just wishful thinking?

*Photos: One UI 8.0 VS One UI 8.5

There have been good things and bad things in the time I've used my phone with the One UI 8.5 update so far.

Here are the pros and cons:

PROS:

-The new One UI 8.5 redesign with floating buttons and the Infinity Display looks great in my opinion. As does the refreshed look of most apps.

-The Quick Panel customization is excellent. You can do whatever you want and you can finally remove the buttons that were previously mandatory.

-New haptics: It's a minor change, but the haptics have been slightly improved. For example, the new haptics when you hold down the volume up/down button.

-Visuals Improvements: Everything is much more consistent now. The status bar now has larger icons, which I appreciate because previously some icons were too small while others, like the battery indicator, were too large. Now they are all the same size and appropriately sized. In addition, there is now a fade-in in most places, eliminating the abrupt cuts that were there before.

-New animations: There are now new animations in general, such as when opening notifications, closing an app with a live notification, the magnetic effect when dismissing a notification, etc... Oh, and they've now included the animation for opening toggles like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you press and hold them (previously exclusive to the S series).

-Bugs fixed: They've fixed practically all the bugs we had before, such as those in the Quick Panel. The animation skip bug from One UI 8.0 has finally disappeared completely, as well as other minor visual bugs (I have a post dedicated to all the bugs I knew about in One UI 8.0).

CONS:

-Performance: The overall performance of the system/UI has worsened. I expected it to be better, but it was the opposite. The Quick Panel is the worst. The right panel lags almost constantly, and the animation when you hold down the brightness and volume bars occasionally. There's also lag most of the time when switching between the left and right panels. You enjoy relatively smooth 120Hz until you touch the right panel (or the expanded panel if it's in together mode).

-Google app colors: The colors in some parts of Google apps look awful. In some, it looks like the colors are inverted. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it looks bad. You do get used to it over time, though. The Phone app has the background colors reversed in the dialer section.

-Things they deliberately made worse: They removed the animations for the Quick Panel toggles when activating/deactivating them (like Wi-Fi, Location, Rotation, etc.). This was something we had in every previous version of One UI. They also worsened the Quick Panel's blur. Now it's too blurry, and you can barely see the shape of what's behind it. It looks awful.

-Recent apps: The recent apps gesture feature now has a minor visual bug where swiping an app to recent apps causes a mini-bounce (the image zooms in and then returns to its original size in less than a second). This creates the sensation of lag each time you swipe an app to recent apps, even though there isn't actual lag. It's more noticeable in apps with scrolling (which also move a little upwards). This issue has always existed in button mode since One UI 7, but never in gesture mode until now with One UI 8.5, where it's even more pronounced. Another visual bug is that sometimes when you have many apps open and close them all, one of them remains there and it doesn't do the animation, even though it has actually closed.

-And a minor visual bug that bothers me is that when exiting an app, the background zoom animation sometimes reacts late, happening after the app has already closed. This didn't happen in One UI 7 in gesture mode, but it did in button mode. In One UI 8.0, it also started happening in gesture mode. And in One UI 8.5, it remained the same, unfixed in both modes.

Conclusion: It's a regular update because it's not the best. On the plus side, you'll get a refreshed and more consistent visual appearance overall, with some new animations. However, you'll also experience less-than-polished performance and constant lag in specific areas due to Samsung's poor optimization in this update, as well as the two specific features they removed or worsened on devices outside the S series (which isn't the end of the world, but it's still bad of Samsung, since these are features that were always there and worked fine).

*Translated using Google Translate as always, with some corrections of my own.

As we've all seen by now, for most of us, the Quick Panel (the right one) lags almost every time we pull it down in One UI 8.5. Well, it turns out I've discovered the cause, and it's nothing new. Remember the lag in the Quick Panel that occurs during the first animation every time you rotate the screen? And how that was because the panel loads from scratch instead of being pre-loaded? Well, literally the same thing is happening, only now it's worse. It's not limited to just when you rotate the screen. Now the right panel loads from scratch practically every time you pull it down. That's why it lags so much. However, this behavior doesn't happen with the left panel. The left panel only lags when you rotate the screen. That's why the left panel usually works without any lag or problems, unlike the right one.

I discovered this after using the phone for a while with animations disabled. As you can see in the video, when the Right Panel pulls down, it first appears empty for a fraction of a second, and only then do the controls and buttons load. It's the exact same behavior that occurs in the first animation of the Quick Panel when it pulls down when rotating the phone's screen. This is literally what happens when the Panel loads from scratch instead of being pre-loaded. And it's the most widespread and long-standing bug that the Quick Panel has had since the early versions of One UI. Let's hope they fix this someday.

What do you think about this? Let me know in the comments...🫡

*Guys I know it's just a screen recording in this case. I added the watermark because I remembered a previous video I put a lot of effort into that was later stolen. Please don't take this post as being about that. Thank you...

Performance in One UI 8.5 is terrible. The Quick Panel now lags almost constantly (mainly the right side) and is the slowest thing in this update. I no longer see the point in using the screen's 120Hz refresh rate because instead of a smooth experience, I get a very unstable one. App opening/closing animations lag more frequently, even when I'm barely multitasking. And swiping to recent apps or exiting an app has a delay that wasn't there before. Furthermore, the animation for apps going to recent apps has a minor bug where it enlarges and returns to its original size in less than a second, making it seem like there's lag (oddly enough, this happens mostly with apps that involve scrolling, like social media, the gallery, etc.).

This is unacceptable. I'm literally having a worse UI experience in terms of fluidity than a low-end phone from any other brand. Because these lags aren't even caused by the power of our phones anymore. I tried a 4GB Redmi 14C, and the Quick Panel scrolls down perfectly smoothly with zero lag. In contrast, mine lags every time I scroll down. I'm not complaining about the speed at which apps, games, and everything else load. In that respect, it's fine and in line with my phone's power. But there's no excuse for practically every animation lagging for no reason. It makes you feel like you have a worse phone than you're paying for. I remember that with One UI 6.1 (the stock version), I barely had any lag, and the phone felt perfectly fluid. Even when recording the screen, the 120Hz refresh rate remained constant. Now, screen recording drastically reduces the FPS, and everything lags even more.

What do you all think? I was hoping One UI 8.5 would be the most optimized and polished version yet. Instead, we got terrible optimization and features that were previously fine were removed or ruined. Are you experiencing this too? Let me know in the comments...🤗

*In the video, what I'm saying won't be as noticeable, since the instability is more apparent when you're using 120Hz and the video only goes up to 30 FPS. And believe me, when using your phone normally, you'll experience these lags I'm talking about when you least expect them, without doing anything demanding or anything like that.

This has to be a joke. How is it possible that these two animations are literally running at 30 FPS? It makes no sense. Just compare the FPS of the ball in the touch animation and those two brush sliders. The difference is clearly noticeable.

Here's the original video so you can see the real difference. (I recorded it with 120Hz enabled): https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/wSVFh8KQvq7T

What did Samsung do with the animations? Confirm if I'm not the only one experiencing this.

For those who haven't noticed, the blur effect in the Quick Panel was nerfed on all A/M/F series devices in the One UI 8.5 update, making it look much worse than in One UI 8.0. The blur is now too blurry, making it nearly impossible to see what's behind it. It now looks more like a gradient than a blur. It looks really bad and it's another one of Samsung's strategies to keep worsening the software on devices that aren't part of the S series. There's no way to improve this either. Not Theme Park or anything.

What do you think? Do you believe it will return to its previous state in One UI 9, or will Samsung continue removing features and worsening the software on devices that aren't part of the S series?

Guys. The TPA update has arrived. I wasn't expecting it to arrive on the same day as the global rollout...😃