One UI 6.0 might not feature screen burn-in protection

The Android 14-based One UI 6.0 update has been released for several high-end and mid-range phones over the past few weeks. It brings a lot of new features and design changes to Samsung phones, but it also appears to have removed a critical feature that stops devices with OLED screens from getting screen burn-in issues.

One UI 6.0 might lack screen burn-in protection for status bar elements

According to some users, One UI 6.0 lacks the screen burn-in protection feature. This could lead to long-term image retention issues on devices that use OLED screens. All modern phones with an OLED panel have a built-in feature that shifts pixels of certain UI elements slightly so that the same image isn't displayed on the same group of pixels over and over again. As you can see in the images below, the left image is of One UI 5, and the status bar and navigation bar elements have drifted slightly to avoid screen burn-in. The screenshot on the right is of a phone running One UI 6, and its navigation bar elements have shifted, but not the status bar elements.

What is screen burn-in on OLED screens?

For example, when the status bar and navigation bar elements (battery icon, clock, home button, back button, and multitasking button) don't shift their position on an OLED screen, it could lead to screen burn-in. If you don't know what screen burn-in is, it is a shortcoming of almost all OLED panels where displaying the same images/UI elements for long periods of time degrades the organic material inside pixels, leading to reduced brightness. This leads to image retention, patches, and other issues.

Pixel shifting is a common prevention method to avoid screen burn-in on OLED screens, and Samsung has been using it since the launch of the Galaxy S3. However, this feature seems to be missing on phones running One UI 6.0. To be specific, pixel shifting seems to be missing for the status bar. This was revealed by Reddit user dragosslash (via Android Authority), and more Reddit users since then have confirmed this to be the case. To be clear, phones running One UI 5 still have the screen burn-in protection feature.

We hope that Samsung fixes this bug and releases an update to all phones running One UI 6.