You know how we said everyone but Pixel owners will have to wait for their smartphone manufacturers to integrate Android 12 into their proprietary OS, which could take months? Well, Samsung didn’t feel like waiting. The company announced on Tuesday 14 September that the One UI 4 public beta is available for the S21 series.

Unfortunately, once again South Africa didn’t make the cut of officially supported countries which include the US, South Korea, the UK, India, China, Germany, and Poland. If you’re in one of those countries and reading this, you can head over to the Samsung Members app and enrol in the beta now.

For us here in SA, we’ll need to wait for the stable release. But at least this is an indication that Samsung is actively working on its One UI 4 update. Hopefully, we get it a bit sooner than One UI 3 took.

Samsung includes a surprising number of phones

The South Korean conglomerate isn’t leaving many devices out of the planned eventual update to One UI 4, although some devices will get it sooner than others. The latest S series flagships are usually the first to get these kinds of updates, which is the case here with the S21 series. They should get the update — if everything remains on track — by December.

Those will be followed by the older S20 and S10 series devices as well as the Z series of foldables and the Note 10 and 20 series. We don’t have the exact dates for when each separate device will get the update. Samsung will release that at a later stage. But as a rule of thumb, if your device hasn’t had three Android updates yet it’s probably on the list.