Our six favorite Samsung Good Lock features for you to get started with
Samsung phones have improved a lot over the years, and it’s no surprise that you’ll often see them topping the list ofour favorite Android phones. One of the many things we love about them is the extent of software customization available, and a collection of apps called Good Lock makes these phones even more tweakable than they are out of the box. Recently,Good Lock started expanding to more countries, giving a lot of users their first opportunity to use it. The sheer number of options in Good Lock could appear intimidating, so if you’re just getting up to speed and need some advice on what to check out, here are our favorite features to get you started.
As we get into it, keep in mind that Good Lock is composed of many different, individual modules, and each time a new release of One UI arrives, Samsung stops updating modules for the old version, and turns all its attention to the future. That means that many of the features discussed today might work with One UI 4 and even possibly One UI 3, but we’re approaching this looking at compatibility with One UI 5 based on Android 13, which is what we’re using on ourGalaxy S22 Ultra. We’d also like to note that the names of some of these Good Lock modules, as well as general text within the app, might seem a little odd. You can blame some wonky translations on many of those, but thankfully things still mostly make sense.
Improve navigation gestures with One Hand Operation +
One Hand Operation + lets you choose which areas of the screen are used to trigger navigation gestures. We’ve lined this area up with the bottom of our power button, so swiping below that triggers gestures, while swiping above that allows us to pull out menus, etc.
Going further down the rabbit hole, this module can assign up to twelve actions (six per side) to different gestures. You can swipe diagonally up, down, or straight out, and then set different actions to these triggers if you swipe out and hold. We like to keep these settings the same on both sides, but your preferences may vary. In our test setup, short swipes are assigned to general navigation. Moving up, down, or out triggers the recent apps, home, and back actions, respectively. This is especially useful on phones like the S22 Ultra and the Z Fold 4 when unfolded — when holding either of those devices in one hand, reaching your thumb to the bottom of the screen is a stretch, so being able to do everything from the side of the screen is far more comfy.
Moving into the long swipes, we have up, down, and out triggering the widget pop-up, one-handed mode, and quick tools, respectively. The widget pop-up is a small pane that can have multiple pages where you can place any widget you like for instant access without going to the home screen — we keep our Galaxy Buds controls here. One-handed mode is pretty self-explanatory, but the quick tools pop-up is incredibly useful. From there you can adjust display brightness and volume, control media, and toggle Wi-Fi, sound profiles, Bluetooth, auto rotate, and more. There are forty-seven actions that can be assigned to these triggers, so there’s lots to explore with this one.
Change your home screen icons with Theme Park
Samsung has integrated custom icons into One UI with the Theme Park module. Theme Park can create entire system themes for your phone, but now that we have Material You, we prefer to ignore that part of the app and focus on the icons. The first thing this app lets you do is change the adaptive icon shape, which is perfect if all you want to do is to get rid of Samsung’s “squircle” icons and get round ones like a Pixel. You can also use any icon pack downloaded from the Google Play Store. All changes are made system-wide, so you’ll see your new icons in the settings menu, overview screen, and the home screen. The app is easy to use, but it’s a longer process than we have time for today, so if you want a step-by-step guide ofhow to use Theme Park, you can find one here.
Expand your Quick Settings through QuickStar
By default, the S22 Ultra uses a 4x3 grid size for quick settings in the notification shade. That leaves a lot of wasted space, which is why we’re pleased to say that QuickStar lets you change that grid density. Within the QuickStar app you’ll find a toggle called “show quick button grid.” WIth this enabled, pull down your quick settings, tap the three-dot menu, and hit button grid. This reveals a slider which changes the grid size. Pulling the slider to the left “wide” side will decrease the grid to 3x3, and dragging it to “narrow” will increase the grid up to 6x3.
Resurrect System UI Tuner via QuickStar
For a few years Google had a hidden menu called the System UI Tuner which let users hide certain icons from the status bar. Sadly, this menu was deprecated in Android 9.0, but Samsung has recreated it in QuickStar. Open the “visibility of indicator icons” menu, and you’ll find an extensive list of icons that can be hidden from the status bar. In our case, we always have our S22 Ultra set to silent with a smartwatch connected, and there’s always an active alarm. That makes the icons for these functions an annoyance that makes everything look cluttered, so we switch them off. Depending on country and carrier, some Samsung phones show an icon indicating that NFC is enabled, which is entirely useless and annoying — this can be disabled here, as well.
Use TapBack with RegiStar
Some Pixels and iPhones have a feature that lets you double tap the back of your phone to perform an action. The same thing is now a feature enabled in RegiStar, and it’s available on any Galaxy S or Z Flip device that’s running One UI 5. You can assign several actions, including taking a screenshot, accessing Google Assistant, starting a pop-up window, showing notifications, and many more. The app supports double and triple taps, so you can have multiple triggers assigned at once. Because this module is so new, it can take a few seconds for the tap to be registered and for the action to happen.
Supercharge your S Pen through Pentastic
Pentastic is a Good Lock module that modifies S Pen behavior, and it’s a module we’ve come to love. The first thing this module does is change the style of Air Command, the floating menu that appears when the S Pen’s button is pressed. Air Command has been redesigned several times throughout the life of the Note series, and here you can go back to these older designs. The retro style is an exact recreation of Air Command as it debuted on the Note 2, and circle is an adaptation of this that allows for more shortcuts and custom apps. Our favorite is circle — there’s something satisfying about spinning the menu like an old rotary phone, and it isn’t as intrusive as the default style.
Moving further on through the app, you’re able to change the S Pen pointer to an arrow, a heart, or one of the little animals Samsung includes in its stickers. You can also load any PNG image as a pointer, so if you want to fight the evil forces of the Decepticons with an Autobot S Pen pointer, there’s nothing to stop you. You can also customize the sounds played when you remove and insert the S Pen. There are presets available, or you can choose MP3 files of your own — our S22 Ultra plays the orange and blue sound effects from Portal 2 when the Pen is inserted or removed.
That’s just scratching the surface
There’s so much more that you can do with Good Lock, and trying to cover everything would require an article ten times the length of this one. Now that you’ve seen what our favorite parts of Good Lock are, take the time to dig through all the modules for yourself. There’s no limit to the amount of tweaking you can do that will have your phone feeling uniquely yours.
For now, the only downside to Good Lock is the inability to sync these changes across devices, or back them up in case of a reset.Samsung does have a new modulein the works that will fix that, but for now it is region locked to South Korea, and sideloading the APK doesn’t get around that. As Good Lock continues to improve and adapt, we’ll be here to keep you up to date with all the best features.
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