Samsung’s One UI 6.0 may not feature screen burn-in protection

The Android 14-based One UI 6.0 update has been released to several high-end and mid-range phones over the past few weeks. It brings a lot of new features and design changes to Samsung phones, but it also appears to have removed an important feature that prevents devices with OLED displays from experiencing screen burn-in issues.

One UI 6.0 may lack screen burn-in protection for status bar items

According to some users, One UI 6.0 lacks the screen burn-in protection feature. This may lead to long-term image retention issues on devices using OLED displays. All modern phones with an OLED panel have a built-in feature that changes the pixels of certain user interface elements slightly so that the same image is not displayed on the same set of pixels over and over again. As you can see in the images below, the left image is of One UI 5, and the status bar and navigation bar elements have been drifted slightly to avoid screen burn-in. The screenshot on the right is of a phone running One UI 6, and its navigation bar items have been changed, but not the status bar items.

What is screen burn-in on OLED displays?

For example, when the status bar and navigation bar elements (battery icon, clock, home button, back button, multitasking button) do not change their position on an OLED screen, it may result in screen burn-in. If you don’t know what screen burn-in is, it is a defect in almost all OLED panels where displaying the same images/UI elements for long periods of time causes the organic materials within the pixels to degrade, resulting in decreased brightness. This causes image retention, corrections, and other issues.

Pixel swapping is a popular prevention method to avoid screen burn-in on OLED displays, and Samsung has been using it since the launch of the Galaxy S3. However, this feature seems to be missing in phones running One UI 6.0. Specifically, pixel shifting appears to be missing in the status bar. This was it open By Reddit user com.dragosslash (Via Android body), and more Reddit users have since confirmed that this is the case. To be clear, phones running One UI 5 still have screen burn-in protection.

Hopefully, Samsung will fix this bug and release an update for all phones running One UI 6.