Samsung introduced an Always On Display for its flagship smartphones with the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 Edge over two years ago. It has gradually improved the feature over this period by tweaking it to make it more useful. It has been easy for the company to do this because Always On Display exists as a separate app so Samsung doesn’t have to push out updates for it with a system update, it can just roll out an app update. That’s precisely what it has done earlier this week to bring GIF support to the Always On Display.
Samsung has previously offered customization options for this feature as well which included themes and the ability to add your own photos to the Always On Display. GIF display takes things up a notch because not only can users select a GIF from Samsung’s library but they’re also free to add one of their own GIFs from the handset’s gallery.
The new addition isn’t without its caveats, though. For starters, the GIF can’t be too long so you’ll have to trim it in the gallery of the one you want to use is too long. It won’t loop automatically as well, the GIF only play the one time when the display is turned off but you can have it play once more when the display is off by double-tapping on the GIF.
Perhaps the biggest caveat here is that this feature is only available on devices that are running Android 8.0 Oreo. Samsung has released it for the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy Note 8 so far which means that Galaxy S7 owners are out of luck. This works on the Galaxy S9 as well since the device already comes with Oreo out of the box.