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Third-Party Launchers & One UI

(Topic created on: 19-09-2021 07:17 AM)
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Gino76ph
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Hi Everyone.

Planning on getting my next Galaxy phone.

But I wanted to ask Is there a good third-party launcher for Samsung Galaxy phones that is fully compatible with Android 11's gesture navigation and that enables you to hide apps easily similar to Oxygen OS & MIUI? (As I heard Samsung's One UI is notorious in "restricting" gesture navigations functionality within One UI but i'm not sure if that changed now.)

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15 REPLIES 15
mstratford
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Niagara Launcher seems pretty groovy, has clever search and seems a lot less glitchy than the likes of Smart Launcher 5. Can hide apps
LiquidSnake
Big Cheese
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I'm not gonna lie, but Samsung have really improved when it comes to gesture navigation. Just select gestures instead of navigation buttons in settings and on top of that, download Good Lock and look for the module One Hand Operation. Download that and you will make the phone highly efficient via gestures 😎.

Regarding hiding apps, I've heard they are going to tweak this feature in the upcoming One UI release as well as in Android 12 relatively soon. So, I'd say don't download a third-party launcher if you are planning on getting a Samsung Phone that's on the market now 😁. Hope this helps! 😀
LiquidSnake
Big Cheese
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In addition, just search on YouTube as well as looking on reliable websites; how to make (phone name) all gestures with Good Lock and you will have a blast 🤓.
Qwerty7
Helping Hand
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gesture navigation is still broken on 3rd party launchers since android 10, Google hasn't done anything to fix it. It's not exclusive to one UI.
Gino76ph
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But Samsung created One UI. Surely, the coders or developers can sort out a workaround?

And if One UI is still "broken" for Android gestures navigation then why Oxygen OS and MIUI aren't? 

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walkerx
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If you want a decent launcher other than the stock launcher which compared to what it was like years ago, then Nova is the main 3rd Party Launcher and has recently had a major upgrade.
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Qwerty7
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Oxygen OS and Miui are still broken with android gestures and 3rd party launchers, when using the default Google implementation. Some OnePlus devices or xioami might have propiatary implementations like Samsung does but they aren't as fluid overall as the Google ones which are the ones most would use. Either way this issue is present on *ANY* android device post-10 and while it may seem to be better on a certain model, it can even vary between devices. I've seen it be reasolabley usuable on my phone for example where it then out of a sudden goes back to the glitchy, and not being able to go to task viewer manner
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Gino76ph
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In my experience using a OnePlus phone (8T) and a Xiaomi (Mi11 Lite 5G) despite having "near stock"/skinned Android their respective performances are very much commendable than a Samsung (such as S10+, S20 FE and A52 5G). And i'm not talking about benchmarks here. 

I've also used a third-party launcher (the most well-known ones with a review of 4.5 & above and paid ones) on a Samsung and performance is poorer than everything else i've used previously and Android gestures remain "broken" unlike the two phones i've mentioned here.

So, how can you further explain that?

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Qwerty7
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Performance, that's not really something I was talking about but I'm not gonna deny the fact they may be better performing. However gestures are broken on 3rd party launchers on any android phone since 10. Sometimes they will work near enough find, other times it's unusuably bad. That's still part of being broken, it's not consistently gonna be "fine" on any phone even if it's the same model. I've also had experience with Samsung phones (a51 5g and S20) with these gestures and it's the same with 3rd party launchers on other android devices with gestures I tried (OnePlus Nord, Moto g7 power). Neither has provided a smooth or stutter-free experience. What I'm saying is that if it does for you, that's not unprecedented as I've seen cases of it working fine for some but not for others even with the same model. The truth is, it's still not fixed and it's all on Google, it's not consistently gonna work "well" on different devices and when it doesn't the experience is garbage.


Also another thing, it's simply not down to the launcher developer. They can't do anything to fix this. Nova launcher is a good example:
https://novalauncher.com/faq/gesture-navigation (an old article I know, but there hasn't been a fix. Their discord server has a channel dedicated to gestures and how it's) broken on most android devices (pixels it's a bit better due to an animation API)

Fyi, gestures on 3rd party launchers has been disabled since miui 12.5 apparently. That's likely just due to how much of a buggy mess it is for *many* (not all, some may be lucky) users out there, that it's probably best not to use them