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Samsung's One UI 8.5 moves search bars to the bottom of your screen and teaches Galaxy AI to understand natural language queries like "my eyes hurt" instead of forcing you to remember exact menu names. According to Samsung's official announcement in December 2025, internal testing shows these changes reduce navigation time by approximately 20% for common tasks. The update launches with the Galaxy S26 series in early 2026, then rolls out to existing devices throughout Q2.
Flagship Android phones have grown steadily larger for a decade, and Samsung's software design mostly kept pace, moving menus, buttons, and navigation elements progressively lower on the screen. The app drawer's search bar dropped to the bottom with One UI 7. Floating navigation pills replaced fixed tab bars in the Phone and Gallery apps. But the Settings search bar stayed at the top, a small icon tucked into the top-right corner where one-handed access on a 6.9-inch Galaxy S25 Ultra required either an awkward thumb stretch or shifting the phone in your hand.
One UI 8.5 closes that gap. The Settings app now opens with a full search bar sitting at the bottom of the screen, reachable without repositioning your grip. The same treatment extends to My Files, which gains a bottom-mounted search bar alongside circular category icons and pill-shaped folder path indicators that show your current location without consuming screen space. The app drawer, already updated in One UI 7, keeps its bottom placement.
The design logic aligns with a broader Android trend. Google's Material 3 Expressive design language, which Samsung has adopted progressively across One UI, places primary interactive controls within the natural reach zone of a thumb held in a standard one-handed grip. On the larger Galaxy S series devices where screen real estate is most generous, this gap between reach zones is most pronounced, and the practical benefit of bottom-mounted search is correspondingly most significant.
Bottom-placement is not a new concept in One UI. What makes this update significant is where Samsung finally applied it: Settings is the app where the gap between what a user wants and the correct destination is largest, and where the cost of a clumsy top-reach compounds across multiple daily interactions. Younger Galaxy users had already shifted to search-first Settings navigation, bypassing hierarchical menus entirely, long before Samsung acknowledged the pattern. One UI 8.5 stops fighting that behavior and starts designing for it, which is why the adjustment feels natural to many users within a few hours rather than requiring weeks to build new habits.
Moving a search bar to the bottom of the screen is straightforward ergonomic improvement. What Samsung added on top of that repositioning is more interesting: Galaxy AI, now operating through an upgraded Bixby, processes what you type as intent rather than keywords.
Samsung launched the One UI 8.5 beta on December 8, 2025 for Galaxy S25 series devices in Germany, India, Korea, Poland, the UK, and the US. The beta surfaced the search bar repositioning alongside a larger Bixby upgrade that Samsung made official on February 20, 2026. That announcement positioned Bixby as a "conversational device agent": Samsung COO Won-Joon Choi described the redesign as reducing friction in everyday device management by letting users describe what they want rather than knowing what it is called.
The practical translation of that language is worth spelling out. Traditional Settings search requires knowing the right vocabulary. Looking for the setting that dims the screen automatically to protect your eyes means knowing that Samsung calls it Eye Comfort Shield and that it lives under Display, which means either remembering that or spending time browsing. With the upgraded Bixby, typing "my eyes hurt" into the bottom search bar surfaces Eye Comfort Shield directly. Typing "I don't want the screen to time out while I'm still looking at it" causes Bixby to enable Keep Screen On While Viewing without requiring any further navigation. Asking "why is my phone screen always on when it's inside my pocket" triggers a suggestion to enable Accidental Touch Protection with a one-tap confirmation.
This is not keyword matching dressed up as AI. Bixby reads the semantic intent of a plain-language description and maps it to the correct system location, then either navigates directly there or applies the change on the spot. The efficiency gain comes from collapsing a multi-step navigation sequence knowing the setting name, opening Settings, tapping the correct category, scrolling to the right toggle into a single natural language input.
Samsung's internal testing measured approximately 20% faster navigation for common tasks as a result of these combined changes. Samsung's 20% figure is best understood as a controlled baseline rather than a universal guarantee. Real-world gains depend heavily on which tasks a user performs most, how familiar they are with the existing Settings hierarchy, and whether they use the search bar consistently. On large-screen devices where the top-mounted search bar created the most friction, the efficiency gain is likely higher; on smaller Galaxy models where reach was less of an issue, the improvement may be more modest. Independent reviewers have not yet benchmarked this claim, and Samsung has not published the methodology behind its internal testing figure.
Bixby also supports real-time web search within its own interface, returning results without redirecting to a browser. This keeps the Settings-search workflow intact when a query extends beyond device settings into general information.
The capabilities described above are genuine, but they come with a practical catch that Samsung does not highlight in its marketing materials: Bixby is not the default assistant on Galaxy devices. Gemini holds that position. Reaching Bixby for Settings navigation requires manually setting it as the default assistant through the side button configuration in Settings, or explicitly activating it by name. For users who do not make that change, pressing and holding the side button continues to open Gemini, not Bixby. This matters because the natural language Settings search that interprets symptom-style queries works through Bixby specifically, not through Gemini, and a feature that requires deliberate configuration to access will see lower adoption than one that works by default.
Samsung is investing heavily in making its software interface feel effortless partly in response to hardware pressure from competitors: Apple's iPhone 18 Pro is eliminating the Dynamic Island entirely through an under-display camera, removing the last visual interruption from the front display and raising the standard for how seamless a phone's primary interface can feel. Against that backdrop, the friction introduced by Bixby's non-default status is a meaningful gap in Samsung's own execution.
The AI partnership picture behind Bixby's web search capability is also less settled than Samsung's announcement implies. An initial Samsung Newsroom post naming Perplexity as the web backend for Bixby's search was deleted before the stable launch, and the replacement announcement made no mention of Perplexity by name. Perplexity integration was separately confirmed at Galaxy Unpacked in February 2026 via a "Plex agent" activated with the phrase "Hey Plex" or a long press of the side button. The deletion and reconfirmation pattern is unusual for a flagship software announcement.
The public-facing hierarchy between those layers remains somewhat undefined. Samsung appears to be building AI capability through external partnerships rather than purely in-house models, while remaining cautious about publicly committing to specific providers before those integrations fully stabilize. The public-facing hierarchy between Gemini, Bixby with Perplexity, and on-device Gemini Nano remains somewhat undefined. For users, the practical implication is that accessing the best version of the search bar feature requires a moment of deliberate setup that Samsung has not made automatic.
The Settings, My Files, and app drawer changes are consistent and complete. Where the bottom search rollout becomes less uniform is across the rest of Samsung's system apps.
The Phone app received a floating pill-style navigation element replacing three fixed tabs, which improves reachability for primary controls. Its search function for contacts and call history still sits at the top in certain layouts. The Calendar and Gallery apps similarly mix bottom-positioned primary navigation with top-positioned secondary controls. The Quick Settings panel illustrates the pattern most clearly. One UI 8.5 gave users unusually deep control over Quick Settings: individual toggles can be resized by dragging their edges or corners, brightness and volume sliders switch between horizontal and vertical orientations, and every toggle including the default Smart View and SmartThings shortcuts can be removed entirely. Yet the three buttons that govern Quick Settings itself, edit, power, and settings, remain fixed at the top of the panel, unreachable one-handed on large-screen devices regardless of how thoroughly the rest of the panel has been reorganized.
This inconsistency is the clearest gap between Samsung's ergonomic ambition for 8.5 and its execution. The efficiency gain in Settings is real. But a user cannot yet build a uniform mental model that says "search is always at the bottom on my Galaxy" because it is not always at the bottom. When muscle memory forms for some apps and not others, the net benefit is lower than if the pattern were applied universally.
One specific improvement compounds the search bar change in a way that deserves more attention than it typically receives. In One UI 8.0, the yellow highlight that appeared after tapping a search result in Settings vanished almost immediately, too quickly for users to locate which item on a dense settings page had been identified. One UI 8.5 keeps that highlight visible significantly longer. Combined with the bottom search bar, the result is a faster and more complete navigation experience: finding the right search result is easier through bottom placement, and confirming which on-screen control it corresponds to is easier through extended highlight duration. Each change is modest on its own; together, they reduce the full search-to-action sequence in a way neither achieves independently.
Samsung officially launched One UI 8.5 alongside the Galaxy S26 series on February 25, 2026, with public sales beginning March 11. Existing device rollout is expected to start in April 2026 for Galaxy S25 and S24 series devices, followed by the Galaxy S23 series in May 2026. Galaxy S22 series owners will receive One UI 8.5, but it is expected to be their final major update, with the S22 line moving to quarterly security patches only beginning February 2026. Mid-range A-series devices are expected to receive the update by the end of May through June.
The April start for existing flagship devices is deliberate rather than technical. Immediate rollout would reduce the incentive for S25 and S24 owners to consider the S26, and Samsung's standard practice in recent years has been to stagger feature updates to maintain a clear advantage window for new hardware. The search bar and Bixby changes are worth experiencing on a large-screen device where the ergonomic improvement is most pronounced. Galaxy S22 and S23 owners in particular may find that the One UI 8.5 update makes their current device meaningfully easier to use, a consideration that may carry more weight than an S26 upgrade for many. Galaxy S25 series owners currently in the beta program can continue through the final builds; Beta 6 released in late February 2026 with stability reported as matching the One UI 8 release quality.
Does the AI search feature require Bixby, or does it work with Gemini? The natural language Settings search that interprets queries like "my eyes hurt" works through Bixby specifically. Gemini does not control device settings in the same way. To use this feature, set Bixby as your default assistant through Settings under Advanced Features, then configure the side button to activate Bixby rather than Gemini.
Which apps have the search bar at the bottom in One UI 8.5? The Settings app, My Files, and the app drawer all received confirmed bottom-placement search bars. The Phone, Calendar, and Gallery apps have received updated navigation elements but retain top-positioned search functions in certain views. The Quick Settings panel received deep customization features but keeps its edit, power, and settings buttons at the top. The rollout across Samsung's full app suite is not yet complete.
Is the 20% navigation time reduction verified by independent testing? No. The approximately 20% figure comes from Samsung's internal testing data, referenced in the December 2025 beta announcement. No third-party benchmark has independently replicated or challenged this number. The gain is plausible given the reduced reach distance and natural language input layer, but real-world results will vary based on device size, usage patterns, and familiarity with the previous Settings hierarchy.
Will Galaxy S22 owners receive all the One UI 8.5 features? Samsung has indicated that Galaxy S22 devices will receive the One UI 8.5 update, but this is expected to be the final major feature update for the S22 series. After that, S22 devices move to quarterly security patches only.
When can existing Galaxy owners get One UI 8.5? Galaxy S25 and S24 series devices are expected to receive the stable update beginning April 2026. Galaxy S23 devices follow in May 2026. Mid-range A-series devices are expected by late May through June 2026, though exact timing varies by region and carrier.