Samsung Galaxy S10 Android Q update: What we know so far

NOTICE: We’ve created an archive of all major developments related to the Samsung Galaxy S10 lineup. We are continuously updating that page with latest S10e/S10/S10+ news so that you don’t need to search for information related to the device on a daily basis. Head here to access that page.

Thanks to the public beta testing initiative taken by Google, a bunch of non-Pixel phones got the chance to taste both Android Pie (then known as simply ‘P’) and Android Q builds long before official release.

The Mountain View giant is trying hard to increase the number of phones in each year, so that more and more companies and users can be a part of the whole ecosystem.

While companies like Nokia and Essential use almost vanilla Android on their phones, others have their own skinned distribution. That does not prevent them to enroll their phones in the early adoption program to help the developers as well as regular users to explore Android Q.

Interestingly, Samsung did not take part in this program. Last year, they were actually quite busy to make the transition from the legacy Samsung Experience interface to the brand new One UI on top of Android Pie.

While the 10th anniversary Galaxy S10 phone are the first to get the One UI treatment out of the box, several pre-release builds were leaked for older Galaxy series phones. Samsung did start a public beta, so that developers could test their apps on the new platform before the wider rollout.

According to a news published by SamMobile, the next iteration of the Samsung skin should be called One UI 2.0 and the base should be Android Q. Moreover, upcoming Galaxy S11 might come with One UI 2.1.

Thanks to a group of Samsung OTA trackers, we now have some concrete proofs about the existence of Android Q based One UI builds. Little backstory first: remember when we talked about the unreleased July update builds for international Galaxy S10?

As a matter of fact, Samsung is now putting MD5-hashed value of a build tag in their public FOTA servers for the Galaxy S10 lineup. For example, the human-readable result of Galaxy Note 9 update query looks as follows for the test builds:

But a similar query for Galaxy S10 returns the following bunch of strings:

I request our readers to notice carefully: although the build tag is hashed, the primary Android build identifier is still readable. In case of Galaxy Note 9, it is 9, i.e. Android Pie. But the Galaxy S10 series is marked with 10 – aka Android Q!

Max Weinbach from XDA was able to decipher the hash values for the Snapdragon variants of Galaxy S10 lineup. According to him, the current build number of the test binaries is G97XUSQU2CSG1.

SamMobile also hinted the internal beta testing of Android Q based One UI for Galaxy S10e/S10/S10+, although they did not post any kind of evidence to back their claims.

Are you looking forward to the Android Q update for your Galaxy S10? Let us know by commenting below.

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