One UI 7's Home Up Update Is A Nostalgic Trip Back To The Samsung I Loved

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Samsung is putting the animation debate to bed

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra in hand showing One UI 7 home screen

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority

Many of Samsung’s Good Lock modules haven’t been working properly for those of us using One UI 7, leaving us to wait for our favorites to be updated for the latest version of the operating system. Home Up, the module that lets users customize the home and overview screens, just got updated for One UI 7 with a ton of new features, and I’ve spent the morning diving deep into every sub-menu and setting.

Home Up version 16 is rolling out now to devices running One UI 7, so you’ll need a Galaxy S24 in the beta or a Galaxy S25. I tried sideloading the APK on my Z Fold 4, which runs One UI 6.1.1, but it failed to install. On my S24 Ultra, it didn’t show up for me in the Galaxy Store’s update section. Instead, I had to tap into the module’s info page inside Good Lock, tap Go to store, and then the Update button showed itself.

When you open the new version of Home Up for the first time, you’re greeted by a splash screen demonstrating a new stickers feature and a new home menu that makes it easier to find the features you’re looking for.

Samsung is putting the animation debate to bed

Animations have been a topic of discussion lately, with a stupid test doing the rounds online where people rapidly open and close apps repeatedly to test how smooth the phone is. As meaningless as that test is, the criticism leveled at One UI’s animations did make it something Samsung focussed on in One UI 7. If the changes Samsung made aren’t enough for you, Home Up has a dizzying number of settings you can change to tweak the animations to your liking.

As seen in the photos above, you can tap into the Home gesture animation tuning menu, and you’ll find some quick presets that affect animation speed, icon bounce, background blur, and more. Classic is the same as what you’ll find in standard One UI; Elegance slows things down marginally and adds some bounce to the icons; Dynamic is lightning fast; and Sweet is slow. Another slider lets you tune the animations from Emotionally (slow) to Fast if you want a degree of control without jumping down the rabbit hole. This is the setting I ended up going for, adjusting to a slightly fast, but not too fast, animation speed. You can see a demonstration of these settings in the screen recording above.

If you jump headfirst down the aforementioned rabbit hole and open the detailed settings menu, you’ll find a list of options that’s frankly overwhelming. Here, you can adjust the damping, stiffness, friction, and interpolator for icon movement, scale, and tracking position. Further down, you get sliders and toggles for wallpaper scale, duration, interpolator, and blur. If you don’t know what some of those words mean, don’t worry — neither do I. There’s far too much here for me to dig through without making this piece too long. Needless to say, Samsung has given geeks like me the ability to tweak our phone’s animations on an unprecedented level, which I’d like to see more of.

More apps for the Edge Panel

The Edge Panel is one of those take-it-or-leave-it features in One UI. For everyone I know who loves to use it, as I do, I know someone else who turns it off as soon as they get a new Samsung phone. It gets its own menu in this latest version of Home Up, and there are three features to play with, as seen in the images above.

The first Show more items toggle expands the grid size of the edge panel from two columns to three to let me see more apps and shortcuts without having to scroll as much. The second Scroll recent apps area toggle does what the name suggests. By default, the top of the Edge Panel shows your four most recent apps. Turn this toggle on, and you can scroll through all of the apps that are currently open. The final toggle shows the Edge Panel handle when your phone is in immersive mode, such as when watching a YouTube video in fullscreen.

Samsung is having fun again

There’s a lot more that Home Up can do than what I’ve covered here, from the downright crazy, like removing the home screen grid and placing icons anywhere you like (with stickers!) to variations of what was there in One UI 6.1.1. Whether you find these options useful or not, I think they’re a positive sign. Samsung’s hardware and software have felt stagnant for a while; the company has even admitted as much. The statement made about focusing on pioneering largely referred to hardware, but I think it clearly rings true in software, too.

More than a decade ago, TouchWiz and Samsung Experience may have had a bad rep for lag and painfully slow updates. Still, they were never boring and frequently introduced new features, many of which Google eventually integrated into stock Android. When One UI debuted alongside the Galaxy S10, it struck a balance between trying new things and focusing on the user experience. The last few versions of One UI tilted too far towards the latter and have felt like cold, clinical updates.

With One UI 7 and updates like this in Home Up, it feels like the old Samsung is starting to come back in the best way possible. By putting these crazy features in Good Lock, the company gives people like you and me plenty of shiny digital toys and buttons without compromising the experience of the average user who’ll never mess with them.

Are you excited about this new version of Home Up and the future it paints for the rest of the Good Lock suite? Let us know in the comments.

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