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Hadlee Simons / Android Authority

When Samsung releases new versions of One UI, it usually breaks some of the Good Lock modules I use every day. The One UI 8.5 beta is no exception — several Good Lock modules have been incompatible since the beta started, including Home Up. Home Up is a module that lets you tweak everything from your home screen icons to the overview menu. Samsung recently updated Home Up, and it does more than make it compatible with the latest version of One UI — it adds new features that have made my favorite Good Lock module better than ever.

Do you use Home Up?

5 votes

Widget resize

Home Up has been able to resize app icons for a long time now, and this update extends the same functionality to widgets. On all of my Samsung devices, I set the screen zoom to the smallest size because I find a lot of the UI elements in One UI to be too big. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that a lot of widgets, Google’s search bar included, don’t scale correctly and look tiny, as you can see in the second image above.

The new version of Home Up has a “Widget setting” menu that lets you increase the scaling of widgets in the home screen, which has resolved the issue I have with the search bar, as seen in the third photo. You can also remove the blur effect from Samsung’s first-party widgets from this menu, which is a nice touch if you don’t like how that looks.

Direct Share exclusions

Direct Share is a part of the share menu in One UI. It suggests contacts from across your apps that you frequently share things with, and it intelligently remembers what types of files are often shared with which contact. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, I find that it seldom suggests the right person, and I totally ignore it. For a long time, Home Up has let you pick favorite Direct Share targets, letting you pin the chats you use most for quick access. The Home Up update takes this further by adding an exclusion list. As the name suggests, this means you can block individual chats and share targets from ever appearing.

Edge Panel tweaks

I love the Edge Panel. It’s been my multitasking secret weapon for years now, and Home Up has offered some neat options for Edge Panel ever since One UI 7. The latest update adds some quality-of-life options that rectify some of the annoyances I’ve always had with the feature. Apps, shortcuts, and contacts have always been separate panels, making it a bit of a faff to set up and navigate. In fact, I’ve always left the shortcuts and contacts panels switched off because of the extra effort involved. Home Up has added an “Integrated Panel” toggle, which combines the three categories into one Edge Panel. When you turn it on, it’ll start as a blank slate, but there’s a button that syncs over your existing apps panel. I’m already finding this useful, adding direct shortcuts to add a new task in Tick Tick and the Telegram chat I have with my wife.

Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority

Edge Panel touch width

Finally, there’s a new option to adjust the width of the touch area for the Edge Panel. You’ve always been able to do this in the Edge Panel settings, but changing the width would make the handle itself wider, which would often cover content on the screen. This option in Home Up alters how big the touch area is without changing the handle you see. This way, you can have the handle on the smallest setting to make reading content on screen easier, while having the touch area big enough that it’s easier to reach. This is especially useful if you’re using a case that adds a lip around the screen. Bezels are so small these days that cases like that can make swiping from the very edge of the display.

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One UI 8.5 is already one of my favorite versions of Samsung’s Android skin, and the updated Good Lock modules are only making me love it even more. What about you? Are you looking forward to trying out the new features from One UI 8.5 and Good Lock? Let us know in the comments.

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DIY Home: What is it and why do I hate it?

DIY Home removes all of the guardrails usually placed on home screen customisation. Grid, icon, and widget sizes are unrestricted, and you can put everything, everywhere, all at once. On the surface, that sounds pretty cool. Moving every element to exactly where you want it without any restrictions could lead to some cool setups and maybe a renaissance of the old custom launcher days. I initially hoped for that, but it hasn’t worked out. The way DIY Home has been implemented is almost unusable, and I can’t bring myself to use it for any longer than is needed.

Long-press on an empty space on your home screen or pinch out, and a new DIY Home button appears in the top right of the screen. Once you’re in the DIY editor, you can move icons and widgets freely without any limitation, resize and rotate them, and add stickers, emojis, and text.

Using DIY Home is like trying to play chess against an opponent who cheats, changes the rules, and flips the board if you start winning.

The controls are, in a way, too simple. Even on my S24 Ultra, which is realistically the biggest screen most people will try this with, there isn’t enough room to move things precisely with your finger. It needs a movement slider or arrow keys, like the widget creator in KWGT.

Another issue is the alignment presets, which are all unlabelled, so you have to press them to figure out what they do. By then, all of the icons you’ve selected are on top of one another in some incoherent mess that looks like it belongs in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Icon manipulation is also inconsistent. Sometimes tapping on a new icon and dragging it while a different one is already selected will clear that selection and only move the new one, while other times it’ll move both or neither.

Using DIY Home is like trying to play chess against an opponent who cheats, changes the rules, and flips the board if you start winning. It’s frustrating and confusing, and it nearly drove me to throw my phone at a wall.

Can you make DIY home screens look good on One UI?

Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority

The answer to that one is maybe. I definitely can’t; the screenshot above is the best I could do after nearly an hour of messing with it. Perhaps if you’re more patient or creative, you can squeeze a nice home screen out of DIY Home, but I think that effort would be better spent on Nova Launcher or KWGT. My colleague Ryan Haines agrees, too, saying he wishes he hadn’t even tried DIY Home.

I think Samsung’s efforts would be better spent elsewhere, too. One UI 7 introduced the vertical app drawer many of us wanted, but many users, including my wife, preferred the paginated horizontal layout. The option to revert to that, along with more blur and background color options, would be more useful than this.

In 1995, Microsoft released Microsoft BOB, which was meant to make navigating Windows more intuitive. It didn’t. Instead, it was an incomprehensible mess, just as most DIY Home creations are, and unless Samsung can overhaul it into something more usable, it’s best forgotten.

Do you like DIY Home, or do you think other features would be a better use of Samsung’s (and our) time? Let us know in the comments.

Tag: Good Lock

Samsung’s One UI 8.5 makes Home Up better than ever