Paul Jones/Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung may bring additional controls for Android 17’s upcoming audio hardening features.
- While Google designed them to be active by default, One UI 9 can let users disable them if they want.
- Additionally, One UI 9 can automatically add all web browsers and games to the list of distracting apps.
Samsung is among the few manufacturers that go above and beyond to customize native Android features to align visually or functionally with their own apps and services. With the upcoming One UI 9, Samsung is working on including two new features that will work to improve your experience. One of them offers more controls than Android 17 natively offers on Pixel devices.
With Android 17, Google plans to crack down on apps that play audio unexpectedly in the background and potentially startle you. It’s called “Background Audio Hardening” and is already available in Android 17 beta 4. This feature essentially requires apps to be present in the foreground, either directly on your screen or through a music playback service.
Samsung, whose own browser also offers a similar utility, may have found a solution to the problem. We noticed that Samsung has added a toggle that lets users disable audio hardening if it restricts them in some way. The toggle is present in One UI 9 beta 2, which was recently released to testers.
Aamir Siddiqui/Android Authority
This option is hidden deep in the developer options, but you can find it below Settings > Developer options > More settings On a Galaxy S26 running One UI 9 beta. It’s hard to say whether the option survives when One UI 9 moves into its stable phase.
Based on the strings in the source code of One UI 9, we can tell that the option has been added by Samsung. Meanwhile, if you want to disable it on Pixel phones running Android 17, you’ll have to use ADB.
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In addition to the toggle for audio hardening, we’re also seeing new options for One UI 9’s new productivity feature that blocks distracting apps at the network level. Based on the code we’ve seen, phones with One UI 9 may automatically restrict the following:
- current web browser
- newly installed web browser
- all sports
- newly installed games
Of course, users will have the option to deselect certain web browsers that may be useful for work.
Once again, it’s hard to say if these features will actually be included in the stable versions of One UI 9 when it releases later this year.
⚠️ One tearing apk Helps to predict future features of a service based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to the public release.
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