Samsung recently unveiled the long-anticipated Galaxy Note 20 series (our first impressions) alongside the Galaxy Tab S7 and the Galaxy Z Fold 2 in its second Galaxy Unpacked event of this year. All these devices run Samsung's One UI 2.5 custom skin on top of Android 10 out of the box. Thanks to our own Max Weinbach, we know that Samsung is going to bring over One UI 2.5 to the Galaxy S20 series before delivering the stable One UI 3.0 update based on Android 11. If you have the desire to get an early glimpse of One UI 2.5 on your Galaxy S20 right now, then you’ll be happy to know that XDA Recognized Developer AlexisXDA has ported a bunch of stock apps from the Galaxy Note 20's firmware that can be easily installed using a custom recovery environment.

Galaxy S20/S20+/S20 Ultra XDA Forums

Flashing a custom recovery like TWRP requires an unlockable bootloader, which means the ported apps can only be installed on the Exynos-powered international variants and the Chinese Snapdragon variants of the Galaxy S20 lineup, thus excluding the U.S and Canadian models. Interestingly, the recovery-flashable package itself is compiled in such a way that it is theoretically compatible with any Samsung device running One UI 2.0 or 2.1 and not just the Galaxy S20. According to the developer, the ported apps work on their Galaxy S9+ without any issue, but your mileage may vary.

Here is the complete list of ported stock apps included in the package:

  • Clock
  • Calendar
  • Messaging
  • My Files
  • Weather (new App style)
  • Smart Manager and Digital Wellbeing
  • Keyboard (new shortcuts enabled)
  • TouchWiz Home (with new little animations)
  • Dialer and Contacts
  • My Files
  • Gallery
  • Smart Capture
  • Always On Display
  • New Samsung Notes

Samsung Galaxy Note 20 One UI 2.5 App Ports — XDA Download and Discussion Thread

The mod is presented as a set of two recovery flashable ZIP files. The first one is required to remove the existing version of the target apps, while the second one pushes the ported apps to the /system partition. It is worth noting that flashing this mod on your device will prevent you from taking incremental OTA updates until the stock firmware is restored.