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One UI 9 could give users a killswitch for Android 17's restrictive background playback controls
- Samsung may be bringing additional controls for Android 17’s upcoming Audio Hardening features.
- While Google has designed them to be active by default, One UI 9 could let users disable them if they want.
- Additionally, One UI 9 may 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 with its own apps and services, visually or functionally. With the upcoming One UI 9, Samsung is working to incorporate two new features that will work under the hood to improve your experience. One of them offers more control than Android 17 natively provides on Pixel devices.
With Android 17, Google plans to crack down on apps that unexpectedly play audio in the background and possibly startle you. It is called “Background Audio Hardening,” and it’s already available in Android 17 Beta 4. The feature essentially requires apps to either be present in the foreground, either directly on your screen or through a music playback service.
Android 17 is expected to handle these rogue apps automatically, but it could also affect audio playback in cases, such as streaming internet radio on a web browser. Another use case may be for people who use certain web browsers to enable background playback for YouTube, without paying for a Premium subscription.
Samsung, whose own browser also serves a similar utility, may have found a workaround to the problem. We’ve discovered 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 rolled out to testers.
The option is tucked deep in developer options, but you can find it under Settings > Developer options > More settings on a Galaxy S26 running One UI 9 beta. It’s difficult to say whether the option remains when One UI 9 moves to its stable phase.
Based on the strings in One UI 9’s source code, we can tell the option has been added by Samsung. Meanwhile, if you wish to disable it on Android 17 on Pixel phones, you will need 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 could automatically restrict the following:
- Existing web browsers
- Newly installed web browsers
- All games
- Newly installed games
Users, of course, will have the option to deselect certain web browsers that may be useful for work.
Once again, it’s difficult to say whether these features will actually make it to the stable versions of One UI 9 when it releases later this year.
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