- Samsung “studies” the potential of vibe coding on its phones
- This follows its Unpacked where it launched the S26 series “AI phones”
- Samsung hasn’t made any direct promises, but sees appeal in users coding and customizing their own apps and UX.
Samsung recently launched the Galaxy S26 series of phones and has made a point of not calling them smartphones – they are now “AI phones”. This was certainly true, with the majority of device upgrades focused on AI software, like the new Now Nudge and expanded Audio Eraser tools, with the biggest hardware improvement for base models coming from the 39% improved NPU processing (the processor in charge of AI tasks on the device).
It also announced the debut of Perplexity on its phones, joining it as an alternative to the Gemini Assistant, and discussed the possibility of other AI models getting the same treatment in the future. But one AI feature I haven’t heard of once – despite it being a hot topic in AI – was mood coding, and when I asked Samsung if the feature might appear on its phones, Won-Joon Choi (Samsung’s head of mobile experience) told me it was “something we’re looking into.”
As Won-Joon Choi noted, the usefulness of vibe coding on smartphones is that it opens up the “possibility to personalize your smartphone experience in new ways, not just your apps but your UX.”
He added: “For now, we are limited to pre-built tools, but with ambiance coding, users can adjust their favorite apps or create something custom based on their needs. So ambiance coding is very interesting and something we are investigating.”
What is ambiance coding?
Vibe Coding is the version of coding to get an AI to help you write, create an image, or complete any other task. You say what you want to create – I would make one that would let me watch regular YouTube videos but block short films – and the AI would code it for you.
This is not new in the world of AI. Assisted coding was one of the first uses of modern LLMs, but recently dedicated ambience coding models have come onto the scene. Just as the latest iterations of AI image and video tools have taken a giant step forward, so have these coding tools.
Rather than simply serving as a second pair of eyes or an assistant to prepare some basic elements that an experienced coder would have to put together, ambiance coding software can help almost any novice create working applications.
Given the open nature of Android — something I had just heard Won-Joon Choi and Samsung CMO Benjamin Braun celebrate in a post-Unpacked panel — it’s very easy for users to install their own apps on their device compared to, say, Apple’s systems, which are more locked down. As such, a built-in ambience coding tool seems like a no-brainer for Samsung.
Samsung seems to agree, but as expected, it hasn’t committed to saying for sure when or even if this feature will ever be built directly into its devices in some capacity.
That said, the idea at least seemed to interest Samsung’s head of mobile experience, and given the excitement generated by coding in the coding space, I’m not surprised by his response. We’ll have to wait and see what Samsung has up its sleeve, but maybe this AI phone thing could be more exciting than I initially thought.
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