Samsung Galaxy A36 review

Android 15 with One UI 7

The Galaxy A36 comes with the latest One UI 7.0 software based on Android 15, and it's one of the midrangers with the longest software support in the industry. Samsung promises 6 generational OS upgrades and up to 6 years of security patches.

Here's our One UI 7 review in mobile view format - watch it on your phone:

You should also check out the Galaxy S25's software section to get familiar with One UI 7.0.

Of course, the video above is based on the S25 series and not all features are available on the Galaxy A36 due to hardware limitations. Most of these are AI-related. That's not to say there are no AI-powered features.

The most notable one is perhaps the AI Select, a feature built on the Smart Select functionality from the previous One UI generations. The AI can now analyze the screen's content in more detail and offer actions based on it. It can grab any text appearing in a photo, make a photo clipping, create GIFs from Instagram reels or make wallpaper using a photo you have open on the screen.

One UI 7

Google's Circle to Search is also at hand, if you want to search more information online for any object you see on the screen.

One UI 7

Read aloud is supported only when using Samsung's default web browser.

You can use Google Gemini, of course.

Circle to Search • Real Aloud • Gemini

Samsung's native Gallery app also offers the Object eraser, which, however, is nowhere near as great as the one in the Galaxy S25 series.

Object eraser

Performance and benchmarking

The Galaxy A36 runs on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 (4nm) chip, a departure from Samsung's own Exynos platform. It has a similar 8-core processor with 4x Cortex-A78 @ 2.4GHz and 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.8GHz.

The GPU inside the Galaxy A36 is Qualcomm's Adreno 710.

The Galaxy A36 is widely available with 6GB LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB UFS 2.x storage (ours), and 8GB + 256GB storage versions. There is also a limited higher-tier model with 12GB RAM.

The Galaxy A36 offers the same performance as the Galaxy A35 and the only minor increase can be observed in the raw GPU scores.

The Galaxy A36 oomph is on par with similarly priced phones from Samsung, Xiaomi and Motorola.

The sustained performance is great on the Galaxy A36 with 81% retained CPU and 99% GPU speed. The phone never got hot and we never saw visible throttling.

CPU test • GPU test

The Galaxy A36 offers adequate performance for a midranger and it will do a good job for most day-to-day tasks and light games. It is far from a powerhouse, and we'd say it is on the verge of being below average as there are more powerful phones for a few bucks more. But still, we'd say it is a solid performer in its price range.