Samsung reportedly agrees to replace user’s Galaxy S26 Ultra that had a swollen battery

The Galaxy S26 Ultra already has one case of battery swelling, as reported by sbradley73 on the Samsung Community. Fortunately, Samsung has agreed to replace the device for free.

The user had the device for a month and noticed that the power button wasn’t as responsive as before. The phone was in a case, and removing it revealed the back glass separating from the camera module. This created an air gap, leading to issues with the power button. Pushing it back down doesn’t help much. The phone’s environment wasn’t particularly hot either, and there was no physical damage.

Initially, Samsung put the issue under “Special Claims,” which caused some issues with the warranty claim, but they seem to have corrected it now. It’s worth noting that the person only received a call from the case manager about the device replacement, but Samsung didn’t send an official email about this at the time of writing.

Current Galaxy S26 Ultra owners should not immediately panic about widespread battery swelling. We’ve seen incidents like this happen even with phones such as the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It’s a manufacturing defect, and lithium-ion batteries do have a failure rate, so it just happens to some unlucky people. Warranties typically cover this defect and provide free replacements to help manufacturers avoid potential public relations disasters.

It’s just ironic that we’ve seen a lot of fearmongering about Silicon-Carbide smartphone batteries, claiming they might swell up or explode, but it’s these regular lithium-ion batteries from Samsung that are always in the news for expanding.

A while ago, Mrwhosetheboss uploaded a video on YouTube detailing his experience with Samsung phone batteries, and how a lot of them randomly expand when not in use. While batteries can occasionally expand when left unused for extended periods, the video highlighted that the issue appeared disproportionately on Samsung devices.

One reason why Samsung has not yet adopted Si/C batteries or ultra-fast charging is probably fear around battery safety.

Recently, we covered another story where the first green-line case for the S26 Ultra may have surfaced. Hopefully, this battery expansion is the first and last one for the S26 Ultra, because the phone is already under constant criticism for how iterative the upgrade is.

Featured image credit: sbradley73/Samsung Community

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