One UI 7 downgrades the Samsung TV experience for phone users

One of the best things about the Samsung ecosystem is the interconnectivity it enables across different device categories. A Samsung smart TV and a Galaxy phone or tablet are a good match, but sadly, the One UI 7 update appears to have made things a bit worse for TV owners.

Before One UI 7, Galaxy phone and tablet users could mirror their Samsung TV screens to their mobile devices using Smart View. As far as we can tell, this clever feature is no longer available for Galaxy devices running One UI 7.

Galaxy phones and tablets running One UI 6.1.1 and earlier versions offer two mirroring options through Smart View. One lets you mirror your mobile device's screen to your TV, and the other allows you to mirror your TV screen to your mobile device. Here's what it looks like.

Smart View on Galaxy devices running One UI 7 still supports screen mirroring from your Galaxy phone or tablet to a Samsung TV, but it no longer works the other way around. The “other devices -> phone” category no longer exists in Smart View in One UI 7.

Furthermore, the option to mirror your TV to your mobile device is also missing in the latest SmartThings app versions. The feature used to be accessible after selecting the TV and tapping the three-dot menu button. It is now missing in SmartThings regardless of which One UI version you use.

So, as far as we can tell, One UI 7 users can no longer mirror their TV screens to their Galaxy mobile devices. Or if this feature exists and is hidden somewhere, it's pretty darn well hidden. We haven't found it. We'd be happy to be proven wrong in this case, and we'll let you know if that's true. Even then, we'd probably still call this a downgrade to the TV experience due to a lack of convenience and easy access.

Realistically, we have to admit that we haven't used this feature too often before One UI 7. We're probably not the only ones. This type of screen mirroring wasn't flawless, and DRM content caused issues. But we always hoped for improvements rather than Samsung axing it.

Samsung may have noticed that too few people use screen mirroring from TVs to Galaxy mobile devices through Smart View and decided it was time to remove the feature. After all, based on user metrics, the company went as far as removing Bluetooth from the S Pen earlier this year, so the decision to remove this TV feature from Smart View in One UI 7 probably wasn't too difficult.