Have you ever wanted a feature so badly that you’d go to great lengths to get it? The Galaxy S25 series introduced many new software features, but the headlining feature, Now Brief, remains a device exclusive. That is, until one user got it working on their Galaxy S23+. For those who don’t know, Now Brief surfaces information most relevant to you at any point of time, whether it be the weather outside, your upcoming events, your health info, and much more.
How did they enable Now Brief?
I previously managed to surface the settings pages for Now Brief, but the feature wasn’t functional at that time. But @DalgleishGX on X managed to force his way into the Now Brief’s UI. He sideloaded a specific version of Personal Data Intelligence, 7.0.03.2 to be specific, and then launched Now Brief’s activity by setting it as a lock screen shortcut in System UI Tuner. He made a tutorial for you to try yourself, but there are some caveats to be aware of.
First of all, this will not work on any non-S25 device running One UI 7, including the S24 beta, A56, A36, etc… The version of Personal Data Intelligence on these devices is actually higher than 7.0.03.2, and have all the Now Brief activities removed. You also can’t install the S25 specific version either, thanks to new install policies enforced on Samsung system apps with One UI 7. The user who discovered this ran this on One UI 6.1, which showed the activity, but still has limitations. Thus far, only Weather appears, and the widget doesn’t appear either. It can only be launched via the lock screen shortcut.
Is Samsung Lying to Users?
A Samsung executive previously told us that older devices couldn’t handle running Now Brief, claiming the feature requires “advanced chipsets and hardware like those in the Galaxy S25 Series”. But this directly opposes that claim. Even with the limited functionality, this feature is perfectly capable of running on older devices. On the surface, this indicates that Samsung placed an artificial limitation to make Now Brief an S25 series exclusive feature. Of course, there could be more to the story, such as thermal considerations and computational power required for quality results. We’ve reached out to Samsung for further comment on this story and will update here if we receive a response.
We don’t recommend trying this for yourself, as it’s overwriting system apps, and could break features that depend on Personal Data Intelligence. But if you are curious enough, then know that, at least for now, it is possible to run Now Brief on unsupported devices.
