The day when the Galaxy S7 gets the latest Android version might not be far down the road if rumors are taken into account.
Even though the Galaxy S7 is considered as a leading smartphone and released in March, it still runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which was released last year.
Ever since Nougat's release in August, there is growing anticipation for the arrival of the OS to the Galaxy S7. There were even rumors that Samsung was testing the Grace UX along with Nougat on the Galaxy S7 and its curved edge sibling, the Galaxy S7 Edge, when these devices were spotted on Geekbench.
The latest sighting of the Galaxy S7 running Android Nougat comes courtesy of GFXBench, which could mean that Samsung will soon roll out the update to the device.
However, SamMobile reports that Nougat might first arrive to "international models of the handsets," which are currently used in Europe. This follows a pattern adopted by Samsung in the previous years, in which it first rolls out firmware updates to European countries before bringing them to the United States.
A few weeks earlier, there were indications that Samsung was already testing Android 7.0 Nougat on the Galaxy S7 in Poland. However, since this report about testing emerged, there has been no official rollout of the update.
Therefore, it is likely that Samsung has used the interim period to ensure that the test build of Nougat is running well on the Galaxy S7. With the spotting of the smartphone running Nougat on GFXBench it appears that the testing process might be drawing to an end and the update could be made official soon.
When Android Nougat was released, it was only made available on devices like the Nexus 5X, Nexus 9 and Nexus 6P. With Pixel and the Pixel XL being launched with Android 7.0 Nougat right out-of-the-box on Oct. 4, it is clear that such devices have an edge over others like the Galaxy S7 in terms of new features. So Samsung is likely going to try to bring the new features available on Android 7.0 to its flagships as soon as possible to ensure it does not fall behind others.
Samsung usually rolls out updates to Android in phases because it takes time to layer a skin on stock Android. This process has often resulted in delays over the past years, and users are probably hoping that it will not be repeated this year.
