One UI 8.5 Adds Practical Upgrades to Samsung Calendar, Reminder

Alongside UI enhancements, Samsung’s One UI 8.5 updates for the Calendar and Reminder apps bring useful new features. While these updates don’t radically change how the apps work, they add several thoughtful tools that make day-to-day planning easier. Here’s what you are getting.

Samsung Calendar gets five practical upgrades, and Reminder gets one

Samsung Calendar introduces five notable changes in One UI 8.5. The Countdown widget now offers AI-generated image backgrounds based on your calendar titles. The feature doesn’t appear to work properly in Beta 2, but Samsung should soon enable it from the backend.

You also get an option to hide past schedules, helping keep the interface clutter-free. Additionally, you can mark reminders as complete directly from Calendar. The app also supports multiple image attachments with a cleaner display layout and boasts improved natural-language search for faster event lookup

Coming to Reminder, its One UI 8.5 update introduces a new Early Alert option. When creating a reminder, you can now choose to be notified before the actual reminder time. The Early Alert feature offers three options: 1 Day Before, 1 Week Before, and Custom (set any date and time).

For example, if you schedule a reminder to pay bills on December 25 at 8:00 AM, Early Alert can notify you on December 24, December 19, or any custom time you choose. Think of it as a heads-up reminder that helps you prepare in advance, rather than reacting at the last moment. This allows you to prepare better for the actual event.

Of course, these updates are only available to Galaxy S25 users participating in One UI 8.5 Beta. The updated builds also appear to work on One UI 8 devices, but some features are missing. We still don’t recommend sideloading unofficial APK files onto your device. It’s better to wait for the final One UI 8.5 update, which arrives in the first half of 2026.