Does Your Galaxy S21 FE Have This Annoying Bug?

Following a five-month delay, Samsung finally launched its affordable flagship handset — the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE in January 2021. The delayed launch aside, the phone seems to have been pretty well-received by most reviewers and consumers. An unintended consequence of the delayed launch meant Samsung was able to launch the phone with Android 12 and One UI 4.0. This means the S21 FE shall follow the same update treatment as its pricier and supposedly newer Galaxy S22-series stablemates.

It would appear that the Galaxy S21 FE is in desperate need of an immediate update as a large number of users have started reporting an annoying display refresh rate bug on the phone. This peculiar software bug on the phone is causing massive UI lag on the phone, rendering it near-unusable. The issue seems to be fairly widespread given that a number of users have already started talking about it on Samsung's official forums.

Sammobile insists that the issue seems to happen at random, but does not describe it as stutter lag. Instead, the issue seems to stem from a sudden drop in the screen refresh rate to a place noticeably lower than 60 frames per second. This, in turn, results in everything on the display animating at excruciatingly slow speeds. This in itself is interesting given that the Galaxy S21 FE does not support variable refresh rates, and users can only choose between the 60Hz and 120Hz options.

People discussing the Galaxy S21 FE's display refresh rate problem have suggested  that most affected handsets seem to be the Exynos variant of the phone. This might be slightly reassuring for everyone who bought their Galaxy S21 FE's in Korea or North America, where Samsung only sells the Snapdragon variant. Nevertheless, we're still not ruling out the possibility of this being a broader issue that may affect the Snapdragon variant of the device as well.

As of now, the only solution to the problem seems to be restarting the phone, only for the problem to reappear again. One user has suggested an alternate, temporary fix for the issue that involves using the Galaxy App Booster tool, which may have to be downloaded from Samsung's own store. However, we do not, at this point, recommend this method as its success rate remains unknown. Also, chances are high Samsung will certainly release a fix to this problem with the next software update for the Galaxy S21 FE.