Third-Party Launchers & One UI

[Gino76ph]

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.)

[Gino76ph]

I agree with you on some things but i also disagree with you on others.

As I have mentioned Android 10/11's gesture animations on a OnePlus device (8T) and a Xiaomi (Mi 11 Lite 5G) are not broken, they work almost seamlessly and have/had no issues with them. SI, I repeat...THEY ARE NOT BROKEN. Unlike Samsung. Their developers needs to learn a thing or two from them companies.

I can understand it's not the third-party launcher's fault due to Google's difficult/stubborn stance on gestures and I accept that. But are you saying that If I have a Pixel phone the gestures and animations would be better than say Samsung?

I must insist that Oxygen OS and MIUI (& by extension Poco launcher) on their own so far have met my needs on a smartphone OS. If they can do it then why can't Samsung emulate them? Why can't Samsung developers figure out why the aforementioned OSes just keep getting better and One UI falling behind? TBH I still can't get my head around it. 

[Qwerty7]

I can't get my head around why this is either. It doesn't seem to be company based on how well this works (OUTSIDE of Google, as they added a special API in the pixel version of Android 11 to make gestures a bit more fluid with launchers). I've seen devices from the same company, some work well or reasonably with gestures on launchers and others don't. There's no link between why this is. My own phone is Samsung and when I got the phone I used to use gestures with a 3rd party launcher (lawn chair). It worked fine on mine but not on a friend's S20 I tried. A couple months later it started becoming way more stuttery and really just unusuable, out of nowhere. No software updates or anything caused it. And that S20 now seems to work fine with gestures.

Again, I have no clue why it's this iffy with how well it works but there's nothing that other companies outside of Google have done to improve gesture compatibility with launchers. The API Google uses just adds a nice animation for closing apps and is exclusive to pixels for now, other companies use the default Google gestures and cannot modify them to work in a different way. So any variances we notice are simply down to the unpredictable nature of how these gestures behave. There's nothing companies can do to change anything about how they work, as Google doesn't let companies modify the default android gesture navigation beyond UI or app opening animation (on the STOCK launcher). I've tried gestures on devices from Xiaomi/oneplus which are badly behaving with launchers in the past, it's not down to the company.

[Gino76ph]

So, Is Google intentionally preventing Samsung from allowing smoother/seamless gestures and animations (especially when closing apps) when a third-party launcher is installed?

And why Oxygen OS and MIUI is able to circumvent those APIs or "bottlenecks" and able to deliver a better UI than that of Samsung's?

Or is Samsung just digging their own hole and just avoiding the issue altogether? Coz in my eyes they sure are not listening to user feedbacks anymore. 

[Qwerty7]

Oxygen OS and Miui are not in a different position to Samsung, and it's all due to Google's botched gesture implementation. It's inconsistent between users and sometimes works fine but other times not so and it's between devices of different companies. I have no idea why this is but I've observed this from my experience with not just Samsung and Xiaomi but other companies as well. Some of these will just work fine, others not, and it's not company based

[Gino76ph]

So, that goes back to my original question: Is Google intentionally doing this on purpose? Or "secretly" favouring one company to another?

[Qwerty7]

Google isn't favouring any company over another as I've said this behaviour happens on devices not specific to one compnay, I doubt they would do it in purpose. It's most likely the case that Google really has no intention to fix gesture stability across devices or well, haven't bothered to do so.