Samsung has started pushing the stable One UI 9 update to the Galaxy S26, Galaxy S26+ and Galaxy S26 Ultra in South Korea, The people who were testing the beta are at the front of the queue. On the S26 Ultra the firmware is S948NKSU4BZI6, paired with S948NOKR4BZI6. Those are two parts of one package: the system image, and the Korean carrier layer with the APN and network settings. They install as a single update. It weighs about 550MB if you were already on the beta, and it brings the September 2026 security patch.
One UI 9 is the ninth version of Samsung’s Android software, the layer that sits on top of Google’s Android and decides how a Galaxy phone looks and which AI features are on board. Android 17 is the Google release underneath. The S26 series went on sale in March running Android 16 and One UI 8.5, so this is the phone’s first full Android version jump.
Beta testers get it first because their phones have been running near-final code since May. For them the stable build is a top-up rather than a whole new system image. Everyone else on an S26 will download considerably more. Stable One UI 9 itself arrived on 22 July with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, and the cheaper Galaxy S26 FE shipped with it on 4 September.
What is in it
The big addition is Gemini Intelligence, Google’s agentic assistant layer. Instead of answering one prompt at a time, it chains several steps together across roughly 40 apps, so one request can cover finding a restaurant, checking your calendar and booking it. It needs 12GB of RAM or more, so it runs on the S26, S26+ and Ultra but not the S26 FE.
Below that, the update is a long list of small practical things:
- The phone app folds WhatsApp, Google Meet, Viber and Line calling into one place.
- Quick settings gets thicker sliders
- The media player pulls its colours from album art.
- A network restrictions tool cuts individual apps off from the internet, which is genuinely useful if you are on a bundle and something is eating it in the background.
- Android 17 adds a system contacts picker, so an app can be handed three contacts instead of your entire address book.
Quick Share talking to Apple’s AirDrop is not part of this. That came with One UI 8.5, and the S26 was the first Samsung phone to get it.
When Kenya gets it
Samsung has not given a Kenyan date. “In the coming days” is all the info there is. The S26 and S26+ sold here run the Exynos 2600 rather than the Snapdragon used in the US, and the two carry separate firmware builds, so they do not always land on the same day.
We wrote in June about the S26 Ultra sliding from more than KES 150,000 at launch to KES 115,000 open box with the standard S26 between KES 109,000 and KES 130,000.
If you are on a Galaxy S25, you are further back. Samsung only opened the S25 beta on 1 September, in India, Korea, the UK and the US. There is no published stable date for it.
Check Settings, then Software update, then Download and install. If nothing appears, the update has not reached your region, and there is no legitimate way to jump the queue.
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