Earlier this week, Samsung announced that they were looking for beta testers in the UK for their Android 6.0 Marshmallow update. And the update started rolling out on Wednesday. Now we’re starting to see some of the changes made in the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update that Samsung has been working on. And one of the changes is something that will likely be fixed before it’s rolled out to everyone on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. And that is the fact that the GearVR no longer works with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, at least in the beta Android 6.0 firmware that’s available.
Judging by the notice screen that users are seeing on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, it appears that Samsung may have disabled the Gear VR support for the Android 6.0 Beta, and it will be available on the stable or official Android 6.0 release. So if you own the Gear VR, don’t worry, it should be working when the final release finally rolls out. The reasoning for Samsung disabling it in the beta is a bit interesting. Now we don’t have any official reasoning here, just speculation, but it could be that some things are broken, and they need more time to fix it. Nevertheless, if you use Gear VR, we’d urge you not to update to the Android 6.0 beta release.
It’s great to see Samsung doing a beta for Android 6.0, as some things have changed – albeit not as much as with Android 5.0 Lollipop – and after the issues that users had last year, primarily with the Galaxy Note 4. This is a great way to work out all of the kinks before rolling out the update to everyone else. So far we haven’t heard of any new bugs in the Android 6.0 beta for the Galaxy S6, and Galaxy S6 Edge. Of course, it is a beta, so it’s definitely expected to see bugs floating around. So if you’re thinking of using the beta version, remember that. Betas are never meant for daily drivers, but they can work in some cases. The official release shouldn’t be too far out.