I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra for 10 days now, and the best and worst part about the new Galaxy flagship is its familiarity. The familiar form is good because Samsung delivered much-needed experiential upgrades such as improved battery life, better skin color temperature in cameras, and more without substantially changing the hardware.
But Samsung played it a little too safe with the Galaxy S25 Ultra instead of experimenting and trying new things. It was starting to feel like just another stale incremental update–until I installed One UI 7’s latest Home Up update. It brought new, customizable ways to interact with the phone and truly personalize it to your liking.
What’s this new Home Up update about
One of the first things I recommend doing on your new Samsung flagship is installing the Good Lock app. It brings a plethora of customizations with downloadable modules to your new Galaxy smartphone.
It’s important because, unlike yesteryear’s TouchWiz platform, One UI is light, fast, and snappy but doesn’t feature the same flexibility with customizations out of the box. It’s great for most users since most people need a fast and stable experience. Not everybody wants to go deep and adjust the overall look with customizable animations, icons, etc.
But Samsung hasn’t abandoned power users; it has just moved the customization suite to a new app called Good Lock. It features different modules like Camera Assistant to improve the shutter speed, One Hand Operation+ to add better one-hand usability, and more. One of these modules is Home Up, which has received a major upgrade on One UI 7. The new Home Up app brings granular controls to make your Galaxy S25 experience more fun.
If you are someone who used to root your phones back in the day to make the most of the hardware, the new Home Up update is for you. This Good Lock module is supercharged after the new update. It can help tune the animations to make your phone feel faster or slower—depending on what you like.
The updated Home gesture animations and free app grid settings bring more personalization to your Galaxy smartphones. The former allows tuning the menu by offering four presets alongside a slider and Advanced tuning to further modify them. Go to Settings > Home screen settings > More customizations > Gesture settings > Home gesture animation tuning to get to the new animation adjustment settings.
The Classic option is what you’ll find applied by default to One UI; Elegance adds a bounce effect to the icons while slightly slowing down the animation; Dynamic makes it faster and feels like it’s set to 0.5x; Sweet slows down the animations. There’s a slider below these presets that can help adjust the animations to feel faster or slower.
If you’re still not satisfied with the output, you can jump into Advanced Tuning for more granular controls. It allows you to adjust the icon scale, position, and more. The Icon scale adjustment includes options for damping, stiffness, friction, and interpolator. You can also modify the wallpaper with the Wallpaper Interpolator under Advanced Tuning. It lets you edit the wallpaper scale, duration, interpolator, and blur with sliders.
Go to Settings > Home screen settings > More customizations and you’ll get to the new Home Up module. Now, tap on Home screen > DIY Home screen, which opens a plethora of opportunities to design your home screen. You can add stickers, adjust their size and orientation, and move items freely to make the most of the modern big displays.
By default, you get two options with a swipe pull-down on the home screen to choose from the quick panel or the notification panel. But you can tap on Finder access from Home Up > Home screen to enable an iPhone-like Finder for search. You can also further adjust the icon grid count, folder size, control the background blur, and more.
What else can you do with Home Up
Home Up gives you six setting modules: Home screen (explained above), Back up and restore, Task changer, Gesture settings, Edge panel, and Share Manager. You can toggle the Back up and restore option to save the Home Up settings at regular intervals of one day or one week.
Coming to Task changer, it gives you the option to adjust the recent apps layout. You can choose from Tilt stack, Grid, Vertical list, and Slim list for new ways to show the active apps when you swipe up and hold. I’ve also added labels and toggled the Mini mode to show the recent app list at the bottom half of the screen to access it without adjusting my grip on the phone.
Apart from adjusting the aforementioned animation speed, the Gesture animation tuning module gives you more options like allowing bottom gestures in full-screen mode, modifying Home gesture vibration, and more.
The Edge panel setting in Home Up lets you add two columns to the edge panel and scroll through the recent apps section to see more apps inside this panel. Last but not least, Share Manager allows you to modify the options on the share menu. You can toggle it to show Quick Share devices and Direct Share options.
These Home Up settings allow you to not only modify the look and feel of your home screen but also personalize several overlays like the Edge Panel and share menus.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra isn’t so boring, after all
I’m almost 10 days into using the Galaxy S25 Ultra and had resorted to calling it a boring upgrade, but this Good Lock Home Up update has changed my mind. I have enough room to experiment and explore, thanks to One UI 7 and Good Lock.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra may not have felt groundbreaking at first, but One UI 7’s Home Up update changed that. This level of customization is something you won’t get from Google, Apple, or any other Android brand. While the new update is likely to make its way to last year’s Galaxy S24 series, I expect the new processor tuning to give better results on the latest flagship. I like having these settings on the new phone better because of the slightly bigger and better screen. You also get slimmer bezels on the new flagship phone for a more intuitive look.
My experience with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is evolving as I use the device. Good Lock’s One Hand Operation+ module has helped me rely on back gesture swipes to access the quick panel and notification panel without adjusting my grip on the phone. One UI 7 has me hooked, and I keep finding new ways to make my Galaxy S25 Ultra better.
