Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- One UI 8 just arrived in its first beta, and the release adds new actions to Samsung Routines.
- Clock actions expand with new options for alarms and stopwatches.
- Routines also picks up initial support for Calendar and Samsung Notes.
This is a fun time to be a Samsung fan on Android. Not only is One UI 7 landing for more and more of the company’s Galaxy lineup (including new midrange devices all the time), but the company just opened the doors on Android 16, inviting users to start playing around with its One UI 8 beta. We’ve been digging through it in search of any changes worth sharing with you, and we’ve just spotted some useful upgrades to Samsung Routines.
Routines have got to be the easiest way to start making you feel like a power user. Just by setting some basic if/then relationships, you’re able to automate all sorts of tasks on your phone. With One UI 7, we saw Samsung give us a bunch of new options for the actions supported in Routines, and now we’ve got a handful of further additions in One UI 8.
The first we’re looking at concerns some new clock-related actions. That screen you see on the left above reflects the options available in One UI 7, but on the right we see the extent to which Samsung’s expanding that in One UI 8. Beyond just allowing Routines to turn alarms on or off, it picks up the ability to create new ones and edit existing ones. We similarly get some finer-grained stopwatch options.
We’re also seeing some all-new additions to Routines, with support for actions involving Calendar and Samsung Notes starting to arrive. For both notes and calendar events we get a similar selection of options, with the ability to search, display, edit, or create one new.
This is a good start, and we definitely appreciate having even more tasks we’re able to automate, but compared to the dozens of new actions we saw Routines pick up in One UI 7, this can’t help but feel a little meager in comparison. That said, this is just our first taste of a One UI 8 beta, and Samsung has plenty of time ahead of it to further flesh its updates out.
