Getting Past the Bloat Before You Start Customizing
Samsung phones ship with One UI Home as the default launcher, and most people never realize how much control they actually have over it until they dig into Settings. I spent three weeks last year troubleshooting why my app drawer kept collapsing on a Galaxy S23 Ultra during heavy use, and the fix wasn't anything obvious—it was a setting buried under App settings inside One UI Home itself. That's the kind of thing most guides won't tell you. One UI Home is Samsung's custom launcher layer that sits on top of Android's base home screen experience. It handles your app drawer, home screen pages, widget placement, icon theming, and a lot of the smaller interactions that happen when you interact with your phone daily. Without it, you'd be running plain Android and none of the Samsung-specific organization features would work at all. To start customizing, go to Settings, then Home screen. From there you can toggle the app drawer on or off, change the grid size, adjust the home screen scroll behavior, and pick whether your apps sort alphabetically or by category. The grid options usually range from 4x6 to 5x7 depending on your device. Larger grids mean less scrolling but smaller icons and less room for widgets. Smaller grids give you more space per item but require more swipes to reach everything.
Widgets work differently here than on stock Android. Samsung uses its own widget implementation for many system apps, and third-party widgets sometimes render at the wrong size if you haven't set the widget grid properly. Long-press an empty area of the home screen, tap Widgets, and navigate through the folders. Samsung organizes them into categories like Weather, Clock, Samsung Internet, and so on. Tapping and holding a widget before dropping it lets you resize it by dragging the corners, but not all widgets support resizing. The weather widget is one that doesn't, which drives a lot of people crazy. Icon packs are another area where Samsung diverges from the standard Android approach. You can install third-party icon packs from the Galaxy Store or Play Store, but they only apply to apps that support them. System apps and some preloaded Samsung apps often ignore custom icon packs entirely. I ran into this issue when I tried to replace the Galaxy Store icon with a custom pack, and it just reverted back after a reboot. There's no workaround for that particular one unless you use a launcher like Nova Launcher, but then you're leaving One UI Home behind entirely. The lock screen customization options inside One UI Home are surprisingly limited compared to the home screen settings. You can change the clock style, add shortcuts at the bottom, and enable or disable the Always On Display, but you can't fully redesign the lock screen the way you can the home screen. If you want deeper lock screen changes, you're looking at either Good Lock modules or rooting the device, neither of which is something most people want to deal with.
Good Lock is worth mentioning here because it's Samsung's official customization toolkit, and it has a module called Home Up that completely reworks how One UI Home operates. With Home Up you can change the app drawer layout, add custom gestures, modify the notification panel, and do a lot of things that the standard Settings menu doesn't expose. It's available in the Galaxy Store and works on most Galaxy devices running One UI 4.0 and later. The catch is that Good Lock modules can break after major One UI updates. I've lost count of how many times I had to uninstall and reinstall Home Up after a system update pushed through. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's a maintenance chore you should know about before committing to it. One UI Home also has a dedicated settings section for gesture controls. You can assign single taps, double taps, and long presses to actions like opening the camera, launching the assistant, or taking a screenshot. This is configured under Home screen settings, and the options vary by device model. Some older Samsung phones don't support all the gesture options, which is a frustrating limitation if you're coming from a device that had more granular control. Another thing most people miss is the ability to create custom folders directly from the home screen. Drag one app icon on top of another and a folder opens automatically. You can name the folder, change the folder icon, and even set different icon themes for individual folders. This is useful if you want to visually separate work apps from personal ones without relying on multiple home screen pages.
Get the Full Details
The real problem with One UI Home is the bloat. Preinstalled Samsung apps like Galaxy Store, Samsung Music, Samsung Notes, and Samsung Internet are deeply integrated into the launcher. You can't fully remove them without rooting or using ADB commands to disable packages. Even if you hide them from the app drawer, they still run background processes that consume memory and battery. I've seen Galaxy S21 devices with 8GB of RAM struggle to keep up after a week because too many Samsung services were active simultaneously. Disabling the bloat through ADB is the only real solution, but it requires a computer and some comfort with command line tools. For people who want a cleaner experience without going full ADB, the option is to switch to a third-party launcher. Nova Launcher, Lawnchair, and Niagara Launcher all work fine on Samsung devices and give you more control over the home screen experience. The tradeoff is that you lose some Samsung-specific integration, like the Edge Panels and some of the One UI gesture shortcuts. It's a reasonable tradeoff for some users, but not for others who rely on those features daily. Widget stacking is a feature introduced in later One UI versions that lets you stack multiple widgets in a single home screen slot. Swipe between stacked widgets by tapping the header area. It's useful for keeping related information in one place without taking up extra space. The downside is that some widgets don't play nicely when stacked, and the order can reset after a reboot or system update. I've had this happen with my calendar widget stacking with a weather widget, and after an OTA update, the calendar took the top slot every time regardless of what I set it to. The workaround is to reorder the stack immediately after any system update before the launcher reinitializes.
Home screen layout saving and restoring is another feature that most users don't know exists. You can export your current home screen configuration and import it on another device or restore it after a factory reset. Go to Settings, Home screen, and look for the layout option. This is handy if you've spent time organizing your home screen and don't want to redo it after a wipe. It doesn't save widgets or their positions in all cases, which is an important limitation to be aware of before you rely on it for backup purposes. Dark mode affects One UI Home's appearance, but it doesn't change everything. Some app icons and third-party widgets maintain their original colors regardless of whether dark mode is enabled. This is intentional and can't be changed within the launcher settings. If consistent theming matters to you, you'll need to use a custom icon pack or a launcher that supports deeper color enforcement. The search bar inside One UI Home can be customized to search the web, your files, or both. You can also disable it entirely if you prefer using Google Assistant or Bixby for search instead. I turned off the built-in search bar on my work device because it was triggering unwanted voice assistant activations when I accidentally tapped near it. It saved me from a lot of accidental Bixby launches throughout the day.
One UI Home has improved a lot since the early One UI days, but it still has quirks that aren't addressed in official documentation. The most annoying one is the random icon realignment that happens after certain updates or when switching between light and dark mode frequently. Your carefully organized home screen can shift positions without warning. The habit of regularly saving your layout is the only real protection against losing your organization. If you have a highly customized setup, make it a routine to export the configuration after any significant change or update.
