It’s time for Samsung to abandon the Galaxy Store

Samsung’s Galaxy Store has been around for a long time and it’s where you can download and update Samsung apps, Galaxy themes, apps for your Tizen smartwatch, and much more. In recent years, however, the Galaxy Store has become less relevant, and today it’s little more than an annoyance that lives in a forgotten folder on my Galaxy S25. It’s time for Samsung to cut its losses and move everything to the Play Store.

No app store is free of ads, but the Galaxy Store takes things to the extreme. Every time I open it, I’m greeted with a pop-up for an app or in-game event that I have no interest in and is almost always associated with a gacha app that wants to drain my bank account. You can only disable these pop-ups for one day. So the next time you launch the Galaxy Store to update a Good Lock mod, another annoying ad will get in your way.

Worse than the ads and pop-ups, the Galaxy Store can’t even accomplish its main goal: keeping my apps updated. For starters, automatic updates are somehow less reliable than even the Play Store, so every time I open the Galaxy Store I usually have over a dozen apps that need to be updated, with no notification or indicator to say the same without opening the store.

Even worse is the way apps installed from the Play Store confuse it. As you can see in the screenshot above, three apps have updates available, but each listing says “Unable to update automatically. Installed from Google Play Store.” New versions of these apps are available, but what’s the point of telling me that if the Galaxy Store can’t update them for me? Trying to manually update an app from this screen results in the same error, and the only way to resolve it is to go to the Play Store and update the app there.

When I bought my Galaxy S10 Plus, the Galaxy Store had features I loved using: custom themes and apps for my Tizen-powered Galaxy Watch Active 2. This was before Google introduced Material You, so Samsung adapted the system’s UI to your phone’s wallpaper and color with a custom theme. Now that Material You takes care of the system’s UI and Good Lock can apply icon packs from the Play Store, the Galaxy Store themes section looks like a forgotten cemetery. New themes are always uploaded, but they all have no rating and have an AI-generated vibe. Likewise, the Font Store always has new fonts uploaded from time to time, but that’s no reason to keep an entire storefront running.

As for Tizen apps on older Galaxy Watches, that’s no longer a problem. Earlier this year, Samsung shut down the app store services for these devices, so my old Galaxy Watch Active 2, if I still had it, would be almost useless now. Everything that once made the Galaxy Store relevant is gone, and there’s no good reason for Samsung to keep this dying platform alive.

The only thing the Galaxy Store is worth using for is updating Samsung’s system apps. As I mentioned before, automatic updates barely work, so even this simple task feels like a chore. At this point, Samsung should move everything to the Play Store. It’s already made some progress in this area, with apps like Clock, its portable device managers, Samsung Notes and Good Lock now available through Google Play. Samsung has done half the work, and it is in the user’s best interest to finish the job and make all the apps you need available from one place.

Do you feel the same about the Galaxy Store? Or does it still have a great app or feature that keeps it relevant to you? Please let us know in the comments below.