Own the international version of the Galaxy S3 or the Galaxy S3 mini? Well, here is some bad news for you. Samsung has officially confirmed to the folks over at SamMobile that it will not be upgrading these handsets to Android 4.4 KitKat.

The reason? According to the company, the 1GB of RAM on these handsets “does not allow them to effectively support the platform upgrade”, which is ironic since KitKat is the lightest version of Android yet and has been optimised for low-end devices with 512MB of RAM. 

In reality, the 1GB of RAM on the Galaxy S3 and S3 mini is more than enough to run KitKat smoothly but it is not sufficient enough to run KitKat along with Samsung’s bloated TouchWiz UI properly. After all, those pre-installed apps and absolutely useless features do take a toll on the device resources.

A similar incident happened back in the Galaxy S days, when the Korean giant decided not to upgrade it to Ice Cream Sandwich, even though the similarly spec’d Nexus S was running it smoothly. However, thanks to the community backlash that followed, Samsung did release a value pack firmware update for the device that added most of the features introduced by Google in Ice Cream Sandwich.

On the bright side, Samsung will be rolling out KitKat upgrade for the LTE version of the Galaxy S3 that comes with 2GB of RAM. So, if you live in the United States and own a Galaxy S3, you are in luck as your handset comes with 2GB of RAM, which is more than enough to run KitKat with all of Samsung’s bloat smoothly.