Samsung News Is Shutting Down Dec. 21. Here’s How to Swap in Google Discover on Your Galaxy

Samsung is pulling the plug on another one of its home screen news feeds. Samsung News, the feed that sits one swipe to the right of your Galaxy home screen, “will be discontinued on December 21, 2026, at 00:00 UTC,” according to a shutdown notice the company has started pushing to users. For anyone on the East Coast keeping score, that’s 7 p.m. on December 20.

The notice turned up first for Galaxy owners in India and South Korea, and a moderator on Samsung’s European community forum has since reported receiving the same message. Samsung hasn’t published a separate timetable for the U.S. That leaves American Galaxy owners in an awkward spot: there’s no official date for them yet, but nothing suggests the U.S. version of the service is being spared either. Android Central’s advice is the sensible one. If you’re outside the first markets, watch for the same notice to land in the app.

There is one detail that matters more than the date. Samsung hasn’t announced a replacement.

What exactly is going away

Based on the notice and reporting from Android Central and SamMobile, the shutdown takes out three pieces of One UI at once:

• The Samsung News app (branded Galaxy News in some places), with its headlines, sports scores, stock updates and podcasts.
• The Samsung News widget. It won’t vanish on its own. It simply stops getting new content, which is why Samsung is telling people to remove it from the home screen now.
• The Samsung News media page, the full-screen feed you reach by swiping right from the leftmost home screen panel.

Samsung also says it will delete the personal information tied to the service “without undue delay” once it closes, including account profiles and personalization settings. Some records may be kept temporarily where local law requires it, then deleted when that retention period runs out. Your Samsung account, photos, messages and everything else on the phone are untouched.

Samsung’s revolving door of news feeds

If this feels familiar, that’s because Samsung has done it before. Several times. Samsung News only arrived in April 2023, and it was itself the successor to Samsung Free, which replaced Samsung Daily in 2020. Samsung Daily had taken over that same leftmost panel from Bixby Home a year earlier.

Four brands in the same spot in under a decade. Each rebrand asked users to learn a new feed, and each one quietly reset whatever personalization they’d built up. It’s hard to build loyalty to a product that keeps changing its name.

This time, though, Samsung isn’t rebranding. It’s walking away. Sammy Fans put it bluntly, describing the move as Samsung surrendering prime phone real estate to Google. That’s the right read. Google Discover is already offered as an option for that leftmost panel on Galaxy phones, it’s tied to the Google account nearly every Android owner already uses, and Google has far more data to rank stories with. Running a news feed means licensing deals, curation and ad sales. Samsung has evidently decided that isn’t a fight worth funding anymore.

For most people, I suspect that’s fine. Plenty of Galaxy owners have never deliberately opened Samsung News; they just hit it by accident while swiping. The ones who will notice are the people who leaned on its sports scores, market tickers and podcast section, and they need a plan before December.

How to switch your Galaxy to Google Discover

The swap takes about 30 seconds. The exact wording can vary by model, One UI version, carrier and region, but the path looks like this:

1. Touch and hold an empty area of your home screen to open edit mode.
2. Swipe right until you reach the leftmost media page.
3. Select Google Discover instead of Samsung News.
4. Go back to the home screen. A swipe to the right now opens Discover.

While you’re in edit mode, long-press the Samsung News widget if you have one and choose Remove. Once December 21 passes, it will just sit there showing stale headlines.

One warning: Discover doesn’t import anything from Samsung News. Topics you followed and stories you hid won’t carry over, so expect the first week or two to feel generic. Following a few topics and tapping “Not interested” on stories you don’t want trains it quickly.

Rather not have a feed at all?

You can also turn the media page off entirely from the same edit screen. Your leftmost home screen becomes just another page of apps, and you lose one more thing competing for your attention. If your Samsung News habit was mostly accidental swipes, this is the cleanest option.

If you used it for scores, stocks or podcasts

Discover handles headlines well, but it isn’t a scoreboard or a podcast player. A dedicated sports app such as ESPN, a finance app like Yahoo Finance and a podcast app like Pocket Casts or YouTube Music will cover what Samsung News bundled together. It’s three apps instead of one, but none of them is likely to get renamed out from under you next year.

What it means for Galaxy owners

Nothing breaks on December 21. Your phone won’t lose features you can’t replace, and there’s nothing to back up. The practical to-do list is short: remove the widget, pick Discover or turn the panel off, and set up separate apps for anything Samsung News did that Discover doesn’t.

The bigger takeaway is about where Samsung is putting its effort. By giving up its own feed without naming a successor, Samsung is handing Google one of the most-swiped spots in One UI, and keeping its focus on the hardware, the camera and the interface around it. For U.S. owners still waiting on an official notice, the smart move is to switch now rather than wake up to a blank panel later.

Sources: Android Central, The PC Enthusiast, The Tech Outlook, Sammy Fans. Photo by Rich Tervet on Unsplash.