Did the Galaxy S25 series quietly receive a biometric unlock upgrade?

The Samsung Galaxy S25 series finally made its way to store shelves on Friday, allowing consumers around the world to get their hands on the new Android flagship phones. The new devices offer a major performance upgrade, but users have also noticed an apparent upgrade that Samsung hasn’t mentioned.

Samsung Galaxy S25 series owners on Reddit have reported that the new phones offer much-improved face unlock capabilities. Redditor Wrong_Device_3324 reports that face unlock was “pretty awful” on previous Samsung phones and would sometimes fail to work in bright light. However, the user said the Galaxy S25’s face unlock seemed to work “really really well” as long as there was enough ambient light to illuminate your face.

This sentiment was echoed by several other users in the thread. Redditor Ryan120420 explained that their Galaxy S21 face unlock only worked about 50% of the time at best, and claimed it wouldn’t work while moving around. However, the user added that the Galaxy S25 Ultra face unlock worked about 90% of the time whether he was indoors, outdoors, walking, or sitting. In addition to Redditors, several Twitter users also reported improved face unlock.

Is the S25 series face unlock actually better?

Colleague C Scott Brown briefly compared face unlock on the standard Galaxy S25 to the Galaxy S24 Ultra and found that the phones unlocked equally fast in both ideal lighting and darkness.

“One thing that was different during setup, though, is that the Galaxy S25 on One UI 7 asked me to tilt my head upward, while the S24 Ultra on One UI 6.1 did not,” Scott noted. He suggested that this additional step could be why phones running One UI 7 might get a more accurate scan in some cases. Either way, our quick test suggests that there isn’t a significant difference between the two phone families when it comes to face unlock. But it’s possible that the biometric unlock method is indeed faster on the S25 Ultra or in comparison to the Galaxy S23 series and earlier.

Unfortunately, you still can’t use the S25 line’s face unlock for sensitive actions like authenticating payments or your bank app. That’s in sharp contrast to camera-based face unlock on recent Google phones like the Pixel 9 series, which supports Class 3 biometric strength to enable payment authentication and more.

We’ve asked Samsung about this apparently improved face unlock capability. A company representative told us they were looking into it and would get back to us. Here’s hoping the company eventually offers camera-based face unlock that’s good enough for mobile payments and other sensitive tasks.