In this guide, we’ll show you eight simple ways to make your Samsung phone look cleaner and more user-friendly. Don’t worry, we won’t bore you with stuff you probably already know like changing your wallpaper, app icons, theme, or anything like that. We’ll focus on some lesser-known options.
1. Hide the Navigation Buttons
The first step to making your phone more beautiful is to get rid of the on-screen navigation buttons and use swipe gestures instead. To enable swipe gestures on your Samsung device, go to Settings > Display > Navigation bar and select Swipe gestures.
To take this a step further, you can turn off the Gesture hint toggle to hide the navigation handle at the bottom of the screen. This way, your home screen won’t be interrupted by any UI elements and will look clean, modern, and minimal.
2. Clear the Clutter With Edge Panels
Edge panels are one of the most useful features on your Samsung phone. You can store your most-used apps in an edge panel so that you don’t have to put all of them on the home screen where they might take up a lot of space and look crowded.
Samsung devices have had the feature for some years now, and it’s so helpful that some other brands now offer it too. To enable edge panels, go to Settings > Display and toggle on Edge panels. Feel free to check out our guide on setting up edge panels if you need help doing that.
3. Add a Stacked Google Clock Widget
This is a more subjective tip, but you can make good use of all that extra room on your home screen by adding a big Google Clock widget to get that bold Pixel 6-like look. We’ve tried Samsung Clock widgets too, but they just don’t look as good as Google Clock widgets do. This is thanks to the new Material You design found on most Google widgets.
Here’s how to add the Google Clock widget to your home screen:
Long-press an empty spot on your home screen and tap Widgets > Clock. From the drop-down menu, long-press the Stacked widget and place it on your home screen, then select the Transparent clock style on the following page. Resize the widget to fully occupy the remaining space on your screen.
4. Hide the App Icon Labels
Another effective way to beautify your home screen is to hide the app icon labels. We’ve come to recognize apps by their logo anyway, so the labels are not as necessary and they also sometimes interrupt the look of your wallpaper. So, it’s best to get rid of them.
You’ll need the Samsung Good Lock app for this. If you’re curious about how it works, check out how to use Good Lock to customize your Galaxy phone and explore its best modules.
On the Good Lock app, go to the Home Up module, tap Home screen, and toggle on Hide app icon label. Instantly, your home screen and the app drawer will look a lot cleaner than before.
Download: Good Lock (Free)
5. Change the App Drawer Layout
This tip is admittedly a bit OCD, but you’ll see why we’re recommending it in just a second. On the Good Lock app, go to the Home Up module, tap Home screen > Apps Screen Grid, and set the grid to exactly 4x7.
We’ve found this app drawer layout to look the most uniform of all options. But this grid is not available natively in One UI (which only allows presets of 4x5, 4x6, 5x5, or 5x6), so you need the Good Lock app to set it manually.
After setting the grid to 4x7, go back Home and pull up the app drawer. You’ll notice how evenly the apps are spaced against each other—and they look even better if you’ve hidden their labels!
6. Change Your Recent Apps Layout
You can change how your phone shows recent apps. To do so, open the Good Lock app, go to the Home Up module, tap Task Changer and choose from the options under Layout Type including List, Grid, Stack, Vertical List, or Slim List.
Upon selecting one, you’ll also see a small preview of how your recent apps will look with that layout. We recommend Stack as it’s the most fluid and user-friendly of all the options.
7. Hide Any Apps You Don’t Use
An average smartphone user has anywhere between 40 and 80 apps on their phone. Most of these apps are not used on a daily basis, and some are used very rarely. Plus, with One UI, you also get a lot of pre-installed Samsung apps.
So, it’s a good idea to hide the apps you don’t use from the app drawer. This way, you can find your desired apps much easier and faster without having to scroll or swipe much.
To do this, first long-press anywhere on your home screen, tap Settings at the bottom, tap Hide apps and select the apps you want to hide. Your app drawer will feel a lot more searchable and manageable afterward.
8. Make Folders Open in a Pop-Up Style
By default, folders on your home screen and the app drawer will occupy the whole screen when opened. This isn’t convenient as the apps at the top can be hard to reach with one hand.
With Good Lock, you can make folders on your phone open in a pop-up style instead of filling the whole screen. To do so, go to the Home Up module, tap Folder, and toggle on Popup Folder. You can even customize the look of folders from the same menu.
If you’re okay with losing a bit of practicality, you can use folders to make your home screen fully minimalist. Simply put all your essential apps in one folder and place it in the favorites bar. Combined with the giant Google Clock widget, this setup is sure to stand out.
Make Your Samsung Phone Look Gorgeous
Tech should be intuitive, not obtrusive. It sucks to have to discard a beautiful wallpaper just because the app labels make it look weird somehow. It’s annoying to find an app in a messy and crowded app drawer. And on-screen navigation buttons are certainly not subtle.
Despite how trivial they may sound, these problems can worsen your everyday experience of using your phone. But with the above eight tips, you can make your Samsung phone feel new and stand out, all while looking super clean and elegant.
