On April 4, we reported that several Samsung Galaxy S23 users had been left with “totally unresponsive” touchscreens after downloading One UI 6.1 on their devices, but Samsung has now acknowledged the problem, identified the cause, and issued a temporary fix.
In a new post published to its Korean Community website (via Phandroid), Samsung blames “compatibility issues with some Google app features”, specifically Google Discover, for the irregular touchscreen behavior triggered by One UI 6.1. In other words, Google’s Discover feature – i.e. the part of Google Search that displays bespoke content – isn’t correctly optimized for Samsung’s latest software update.
As for how to fix this frustrating touchscreen issue (at least temporarily), Samsung says the following: “You can improve the problem by temporarily updating the Google app to the latest version, deleting the app's data, and then restarting your phone.” We’ll walk you through how to do that below.
Take out the trash
To update the Google app, head to the Google Play Store and search for it. Tap ‘Update’ as you would do normally. Next, you’ll want to delete the data you just downloaded. To do this, head into Settings, select ‘Applications’, then select ‘Google’. Tap ‘Storage’, then the ‘Delete data’ icon in the bottom left corner of the screen (it looks like a dustpan).
All being well, that should eliminate any touchscreen slowdown you’re experiencing, though we’d advise against jumping back into Google Discover for the time being until Samsung rolls out a more substantial, permanent fix (once you start using the feature again, it’ll start collecting more data, which could cause the issue to reoccur).
That said, if you can’t resist scrolling through TechRadar’s Google Discover-friendly content before Samsung does so (we don’t blame you), you may be able to repeat the aforementioned steps to quash the issue again.
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