Samsung seems to have silently installed a new Inactivity restart feature on Galaxy phones. It’s available on the Galaxy S26 series, and users report that the security page inside Settings has added this toggle with the February 2026 patch.

Inactivity restart is what Samsung calls this new security trick. It’s a kind of automation that aims at elevating your privacy. When enabled, it will automatically restart your phone if it stays locked for a straight 72 hours.

Samsung Inactivity restart

Open Settings > Security and Privacy > More security settings to check if the new “Inactivity toggle” is added. The feature description says it all: “Restart your phone if it remains locked for 72 hours.”

Once activated, the feature highlights another description, detailing the functionality.

If you don’t use your phone for 72 hours, and it detects there’s no successive attempt to unlock, it will reboot. No manual effort will be required for this operation as it needs a user-generated setup from system Settings.

After your phone restarts, you need to unlock it before you can receive notifications and alarms from some apps and see the names of incoming callers. If your SIM is locked, you need to unlock it to receive incoming calls.

Usually, restarting Galaxy sends the phone into additional security mode. It will stop displaying notifications and incoming calls. You will need to unlock the device to restore key facilities prevented due to the restart.

From a privacy perspective, it’s a smart addition. Samsung played it smart by offering it as a toggle inside Settings, that too disabled.

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