Tired of scam calls? The Galaxy S26 might finally have an answer

If there’s one reason to buy a Pixel phone, it’s to take advantage of its Scam Detection feature. Just as the name suggests, the feature is designed to detect scams and notify the user. Last week, we discovered evidence that suggests this feature may not stay a Pixel exclusive for long. Now, even more evidence has emerged, and it suggests the Galaxy S26 Ultra could be one of the first non-Pixel Android phones to get Scam Detection.

As a quick review, we spotted clues that Scam detection could be coming to the Galaxy S26 series in our APK teardown from last week. These clues involved the Galaxy S26’s model numbers appearing in version 206.0.857916353 of the Phone by Google app. Along with those model numbers, we also found a line of code that references “Sharpie,” which is the codename for Scam Detection.

This feature is handled in two different ways, depending on the age of the Pixel phone. For the Pixel 9 (excluding the Pixel 9a) and Pixel 10 series in the US, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK, Scam Detection is powered by on-device Gemini Nano via AI Core. Meanwhile, the Pixel 6 and later devices in the US use Google’s on-device machine learning models. Given that Samsung’s model numbers appeared next to codenames for the Pixel 9 and 10 series, we believe the Galaxy S26 series could power Scam Detection with on-device Gemini Nano.

With that out of the way, time to move on to today’s findings. The Pixel’s call protection features rely on an app called Android CallCore. As the app’s Google Play Store page explains, Android Callcore is included with your device as infrastructure to support phone-calling-based features. The latest update to this app gives it the ability to identify scam calls.

We believe that this app can only be installed on devices with the flag com.google.android.apps.callcore.SUPPORTED, as seen in the image above. Based on Galaxy S26 Ultra log files we managed to get our hands on, it appears that Samsung’s flagship phone has this same feature flag. If Google does bring Scam Detection to the Galaxy S26 series, it’s possible the company could also be planning to bring the feature to other Android devices.

In a test, our colleague AssembleDebug attempted to install the app on his rooted Pixel. Initially, it showed a device incompatibility warning. After applying the feature flag, he managed to get around the compatibility issue. However, he ran into another roadblock, which warned that the item was not available in his country.