Samsung's Ballie is probably dead but rumors of it aren't as app UI surfaces

Published Jul 30, 2026, 6:30 PM EDT Chandra Steele has been writing about tech for the entirety of her journalism career. She loves making tough topics easy to understand. Before joining Android Police, Chandra was senior features writer at PCMag where she did everything from interviewing Jeff Goldblum to explaining crypto. Sign in to your Android Police account Samsung’s Ballie is probably not ever going to make its way into your home, but that doesn’t stop the rumors from rolling in. Today SammyGuru posted images that it says are a first look at the app UI for the roly-poly AI home companion. A possible look at Ballie’s app Credit: SammyGuru The drawings show Ballie, here labeled “Home Robot” and indicators for battery life, location, and status. Underneath Ballie is a button that says “Streaming.” Below that are some buttons whose purpose is less clear, including one that’s labelled “Home Monitor” and one that’s labelled “Greeting” with a toggle switch next to it. There’s no source given for where they came from and no information on where they were found. It’s possible that they were part of a filing for the Ballie itself with KC EMC, South Korea’s equivalent to the FCC in the USS, as my colleague Timi Cantisano posited when we were discussing them. The rumors will continue until Samsung squashes them Samsung introduced Ballie at CES 2020. The cheerful yellow ball got headlines worldwide even though there were few details about it. At the time, Samsung said it was “a personalized companion that understands and supports you, your family – even your pets!” Ballie was not seen again for four years when it made another appearance at CES, this time retooled with AI courtesy of Google’s Gemini. A video of it shows it sending texts that it’s patrolling, feeding and entertaining the family dog, and getting the house ready for its human’s arrival after work. There was word of a possible release date in 2025. And then, Ballie pulled the same disappearing act. Schrödinger’s Ballie In 2026, Bloomberg reported that Ballie was sidelined after delays. In an email to Bloomberg, Samsung called Ballie an "active innovation platform" that "continues to inform how Samsung designs spatially aware, context-driven experiences, particularly in areas like smart home intelligence, ambient AI and privacy-by-design." Soon after, even Ballie’s landing page went dark. But the dream of Ballie has never died. In part, that’s because Samsung made such an appealing case for Ballie and also hasn’t made any official statement that it’s not ever coming to market. As the stir caused by today’s release of what might be the planned UI for the app attests to, there’s going to be interest in Ballie until Samsung says something definitive.