Tap-to-pay on Android has never been broken, exactly. But anyone who has juggled a Samsung phone near a payment terminal knows the experience can feel inconsistent in a way that Apple Pay simply does not. You tap, nothing happens. You reposition, try again, and suddenly it works. Small friction, but friction nonetheless.
The Samsung Galaxy S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra appear to address this with a hardware change Samsung has not officially announced: a second NFC antenna positioned near the top edge of the device. Early hands-on testing suggests the difference is real. Users holding the top of the phone near a terminal are getting clean, first-attempt reads. A Reddit comparison between the S26 Ultra and its predecessor showed the improvement clearly.
Payment terminals are typically mounted at counter height, and the natural gesture of holding a phone face-out means the top of the device ends up closest to the reader. Previous Samsung flagships placed the primary NFC antenna lower, which sometimes required awkward repositioning to get a reliable connection. Apple figured this out years ago, and Samsung appears to have finally prioritized closing the gap.
Some of Galaxy S25 users never experienced payment issues at all. Terminal hardware varies, environments vary, and NFC generally works well across modern Android flagships. But “usually fine” is not the same as “consistently great,” and that distinction matters when you are holding up a line at checkout.
Whether the dual-antenna setup extends to other use cases, like file sharing via Quick Share, remains unconfirmed. For now, the payment improvement alone is the kind of unglamorous upgrade that people actually notice in daily use.
