Samsung Is Shutting Down Samsung News in South Korea and India
Samsung will discontinue Samsung News later this year, according to a notice sent to Galaxy owners in South Korea and India. The News widgets and the home-screen media page in those two markets stop working on December 21, 2026, roughly five weeks after the notice was reported. Engadget first detailed the notice on November 14.
The feature has carried several names. Samsung's news hub debuted as Bixby Home in 2017, became Samsung Daily in 2019, and was later relaunched as Samsung Free. The Samsung News branding arrived in 2023. Each iteration sat in roughly the same place on the device: a content surface reached from the home screen rather than from a standalone app.
Shortly before the shutdown notice, Samsung announced a Samsung News update that introduced short-form videos from publishers including ABC News and USA Today. The announcement and the retirement plan fall within a few months of each other. That timing matters for anyone tracking how OEMs (original equipment manufacturers, the companies that build the phones) decide which content features to prioritize. The notice itself covers only South Korea and India, and the dates apply to the widgets and the media page named in it.
The change also fits a broader pattern in Samsung's software strategy. In 2021, Samsung made Google Messages the default texting app in place of its own Samsung Messages. In April 2026, the company officially discontinued its Messages app in the US and directed users to switch to Google Messages. Samsung News is the latest first-party service to be pared back in favor of a different default.
In my view, the more useful question for developers and platform teams is what happens to the surfaces that depended on that home-screen real estate. Publishers that gained placement through Samsung's feed will lose a referral path, and any analytics or content-recommendation pipeline built around the widget will need a new source. Users who relied on the media page will have to find news through the apps and browsers they already use, which for most people is a small adjustment.
The broader context here is a long-running consolidation of default experiences on Android. Device makers have repeatedly built their own news, messaging, and assistant layers, and have repeatedly found that the platform owner's services are harder to displace than the feature set suggests. Those experiments were not wasted. Each one tested a surface, a partnership model, or an interface pattern, and some of those lessons tend to carry into the next product.
For users in South Korea and India, the practical step is simple. Anyone who depends on the Samsung News widget or the home-screen media page should choose a replacement before December 21, because the existing surface goes dark on that date.
In my view, the episode is a reminder that on-device content feeds are only as durable as the business and software decisions behind them. A home-screen slot is a placement the vendor can reclaim.
