Samsung Scrapping Movie Maker App With Android P Update

Samsung is scrapping its Movie Maker app following the release of Android P, the company confirmed via a prompt that’s greeting all users following the update to the 2.3.03.10 build of the service. The screenshot that can be seen below depicts the message in question, whereas the app’s description seen on APKMirror suggests Android P will be denoted by the version number 9.0, though there are no guarantees of that changelog being official given how it appeared on an independent app hosting platform and was uploaded by one Kelvin Cheung who doesn’t appear to be affiliated with Samsung.

The South Korean tech giant revealed the discontinuation of Movie Maker won’t just mean the app will stop receiving updates but will also see all of its previous projects being deleted, suggesting the service will be rendered entirely non-functional following the jump to Android P. Users who remain on Oreo and Nougat should still be able to access and leverage the old version of Movie Maker, the prompt indicates. The app itself has been pre-installed on the majority of Samsung-made devices released in recent years but isn’t part of the core software package of the newly commercialized Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus, with that state of affairs suggesting the decision to discontinue it has been made before the company’s latest flagships went into mass production in early 2018.

Starting with the Galaxy S9 series, users who select the edit option while viewing a video from the default Gallery will be presented with a more straightforward video editor that’s built into the app and allows for basic manipulation such as trimming and applying filters, touch-up effects, and AR Emoji to clips. More complex video compilations aren’t supported by the said editor, and neither are animations that Movie Maker was capable of adding to one’s videos. Android P that will mark the discontinuation of the app is scheduled to hit the stable channel in the third quarter of the year, with Samsung being likely to start optimizing it for the Galaxy S9 series shortly afterward. Due to the existence of support for Google’s Project Treble, the latest flagships from the company may receive the next major OS upgrade in a timelier manner than their predecessors did, with the Galaxy S8 lineup being yet to make the jump to last year’s Oreo on a global level, even though some units already started receiving the update several weeks back.