OneUI 6.1 Breaks Some Galaxy Displays (but Not All)
Samsung recently released OneUI 6.1 for older Galaxy devices , bringing greater Samsung Galaxy AI capabilities to phones like the Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and S23 Ultra. However, while features like Search Circle and translation tools are nice, they’re useless if your display isn’t responsive.
TechRadar has spotted Galaxy users complaining about their displays not working after the OneUI update on the Reddit and Samsung community forums . On Reddit, the OP reports that after installing version 6.1, their display is completely unresponsive to touch input. The only way to get everything working is to use the S Pen. Rebooting the device doesn’t help either. The OP of the Samsung Community Forums thread tried to wipe the entire phone, but the display was still unresponsive.
While this could signal a potentially widespread issue with Samsung’s latest OneUI update, the good news is that it doesn’t appear to be that serious. We don’t have confirmation yet, but for now the issue appears to be relatively isolated to only third-party displays, also known as third-party screens. If you have the original display that your Galaxy came with, or you replaced the original display with an original Samsung screen, you probably won’t experience the unresponsiveness issues these users are complaining about.
If this is indeed the cause of the problem, then this is another example of the company not prioritizing customers who use third-party parts over OEM parts. While I highly doubt Samsung intentionally locked devices in this way, other companies have done this in the past: Apple disabled Face ID on the iPhone 13, which did not carry over the specific microcontroller from the genuine display, effectively blocking replacement of a non-genuine display. The company eventually relented and released a software update to fix the problem.
Intentionally or not, companies like Samsung and Apple want you to replace parts of your device with their technology. When they deliberately make things worse to convince you to do it, it’s called piece-pairing, and at least one state (Oregon) is fighting back . While this may not be a connection of parts, it does point to a larger issue: You don’t have to worry about your phone not working just because you used a display that Samsung doesn’t make.
Either way, expect an update to come out soon that will fix this issue if it’s an accidental incompatibility with third-party displays. In the meantime, you can go back to OneUI 6, but you’ll lose your data, so if you can get your phone to work using the S Pen, that might be the best approach for now.