Samsung has completed software support for the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. The smartwatches presented in 2021 will no longer receive new features or security updates.
For thousands of Ukrainians who wear these watches daily — counting steps, monitoring heart rate, or paying for transit via NFC — this means one specific thing: the device will continue to work, but will become more vulnerable with each passing month. There will be no more security patches, and this is no longer an abstract problem for IT professionals, but a question of how safe it is to synchronize a watch with a banking app or passkey.
What actually changes for the owner
The watch won't turn into a brick overnight. It will continue to show the time, count steps, and notify of calls. But over time, two problems will accumulate: compatibility with new versions of apps on the smartphone and vulnerabilities in the firmware itself that no one will patch anymore.
This generation was the first in Samsung's lineup to use Wear OS instead of Tizen. During the support period, the watches were updated to Wear OS 6.0 with the One UI Watch 8 interface, which became the final operating system version for them.
In Samsung's latest security bulletin, both models are already absent from the list of devices receiving quarterly patches. Galaxy Watch 4 received its last update in August 2026. The company supported these models for approximately five years.
Five years — is that a lot or a little?
For comparison: Samsung's flagship smartphone series receive up to seven years of updates. Watches traditionally have a shorter support cycle — and this is a systemic problem across the entire wearables market, not a specific complaint about Samsung. The first-generation Apple Watch has also long fallen out of the update cycle.
The question is not whether the watch's performance will decline — but whether the owner is prepared to keep a device on their wrist without protection from new vulnerabilities when it's synchronized with financial apps.
Support continues for the Galaxy Watch 5 series and newer models. So Watch 4 owners should consider: is it worth continuing to use the watch for payments and authentication, or should they limit its functionality to basic fitness tracking.
- Recall that Samsung trolled Apple after the foldable iPhone Duo presentation.
- And the Galaxy Fold 8 became the most popular model of Samsung's new foldable lineup in Europe.
