Samsung Officially Retires Galaxy S8

It’s sad to note that the Samsung Galaxy S8 has received its last security update four years after its launch in the spring of 2017. The much-anticipated launch of the Galaxy S8 was a well-timed success story for Samsung which came after the disastrous Note 7 which had to be scrapped entirely from its smartphone line up after battery problems caused many consumers’ handsets to explode.

The S8 marked a design shift for Galaxy devices, with a wider-aspect edge-to-edge screen with minimal bezels that made it one of the best-looking phones we’d seen at that point. It wasn’t just a good-looking device, either; it offered excellent hardware and a great camera, combined with a remarkably restrained software implementation. Best of all, the batteries did not catch fire.

Samsung recently introduced a formal policy of providing Galaxy devices with four years of security updates, including both S-series flagships and even budget-oriented A-series models. Premium devices tend to get monthly updates, at least for the first couple of years, with the cadence slowing down to quarterly or biannual updates toward the end of life. It’s one of the best support policies in the industry — certainly for Android, and roughly on par with Apple’s typically lengthy device support schedule.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that Samsung has decided to stop rolling out updates for the devices. They were a hit when they first came out and provided Samsung with the best pre-order numbers it has ever seen at the time. However, it’s been over four years since the phones were released — even Google doesn’t support its Pixel devices for that long. The S8 phones got monthly updates for three of those, but Samsung pretty much gave everybody a warning that it’ll stop supporting the devices soon when it put them in the quarterly security update schedule over the past year.

While the S8 and S8 Plus have reached the end of that support period, the S8 Active is still on the schedule for quarterly updates and the S8 Lite is on the biannual schedule. At this point, the oldest Samsung flagships still getting monthly security updates are the Galaxy S10. The Galaxy S9 and S9+ phones are in the quarterly security update schedule and will likely be receiving updates for one more year before the tech giant stops supporting them, as well.