A couple of days ago documentation was leaked showing Samsung’s progress in bringing Android 4.4 KitKat to their older generation devices. These documents unfortunately indicated that the official KitKat update for the International Galaxy S III GT-I9300 had been “canceled for now.”
This documentation stated that the hangup was due to the failure to implement Samsung’s proprietary applications (i.e. bloatware) speculation was that the device’s 1 GB of RAM would make it incapable of bearing the full weight of Samsung’s latest generation TouchWiz bloatware.
In an official statement Samsung UK has confirmed both that the International Galaxy S III GT-I9300 won’t be getting KitKat.
In order to facilitate an effective upgrade on the Google platform, various hardware performances such as the memory (RAM, ROM, etc.), multi-tasking capabilities, and display must meet certain technical expectations. The Galaxy S3 and S3 mini 3G versions come equipped with 1GB RAM, which does not allow them to effectively support the platform upgrade. As a result of the Galaxy S3 and S3 mini 3G versions’ hardware limitation, they cannot effectively support the platform upgrade while continuing to provide the best consumer experience. Samsung has decided not to roll-out the KitKat upgrade to Galaxy S3 and S3 mini 3G versions, and the KitKat upgrade will be available to the Galaxy S3 LTE version as the device’s 2GB RAM is enough to support the platform upgrade.
This flies in the face of Google’s efforts with Project Svelte to make the OS run on devices with limited hardware specifications and as little as 512 MB of RAM. Maybe Samsung should consider removing some of there annoying bloatware feature’s, within the TouchWiz UI.