Galaxy S22 Ultra Users Report An Annoying Bug, And There's No Fix In Sight
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Samsung's flagship smartphone for 2022 — the Galaxy S22 Ultra — has been around for a while now and has even received a couple of software updates. However, if recent reports are to be believed (via GSMArena), a major bug with the European variant of the phone has been plaguing users for several weeks now — without a fix in sight. The software issue seems to affect the phone's ability to connect to GPS satellites, thereby leading to issues with location-based apps and services.
This, interestingly, is not the first major bug affecting the Exynos-powered variant of the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Last month, we reported on another issue with the phone that involved the Galaxy S22 Ultra's display.
Even though the first reports about this issue came more than four weeks ago, it is only now that Samsung has acknowledged the problem exists. The first references to this GPS-related bug appeared on Samsung's European community forums where a user complained about their phone not receiving any GPS signal.
Other Galaxy S22 Ultra users were quick to join in and confirm that the GPS bug affected their phones too. While some people were able to "fix" the issue by simply restarting their phone, others suggested changing individual location permissions on all affected apps to "Allow all the time" instead of the more popular "Allow only while using the app" option. Apart from the aforementioned GPS-related issue, another set of users said they were unable to connect Bluetooth devices to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.
When is a fix coming?
Even though this GPS-related bug was reported well over three weeks ago, Samsung seems to have taken its own sweet time to acknowledge the problem exists. Even now, there is no clarity on how soon Samsung intends to release a patch for this problem. A moderator at the Samsung Forum did confirm that the company is working on a fix. They could not give an ETA for the software patch, though.
One user in that same forum thread posted a screenshot of an email they received from Samsung in which the company said this problem would be fixed in the "next maintenance binary release". While we still do not have a date for that, most users on the forum are now hoping for a fix that would be rolled out along with the monthly security patch for April 2022.
Interestingly, not all Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultras are affected by this issue, with only a small percentage of European users reporting this bug. One user on the Samsung forums made several attempts to reproduce the issue on their Galaxy S22 Ultra, with little success.
What is pertinent to note, however, is that all European variants of the Galaxy S22 devices use Samsung's own Exynos 2200 SoC instead of the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset from Qualcomm that powers the U.S. variant of the phone. It is unclear at this moment if Samsung's much-maligned chipset has anything to do with this specific GPS-related bug.