Good Lock is a Must Download App on Your Samsung Galaxy S21 | Review

The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G is already one of the best smartphones out of the box. Part of that has to do with One UI 3.1 and the amount of customization that is possible with Samsung’s user interface. However, it’s not perfect. There are bits here and there that could be improved upon and luckily, there’s an app you can download that helps fill in those holes. That app is Good Lock, which you can grab on the Galaxy Store. Good Lock is basically a collection of apps that you can download individually which can customize very specific parts of One UI. Currently there are 16-apps you can download from it. Each gets updated individually and more seem to get added over time.

I will say that I have not tried out each of the 16-apps because honestly, I don’t need everything that Good Lock provides. Instead, there are several apps I’ve tried that look the most interesting and provide additions that truly do enhance the One UI 3.1 experience. I”m not going to list out all the apps, but I will show you some of my favorites below.

One of my favorites is Home Up. This app allows you to customize so much of the One UI experience. There are five parts to Home Up – Home Screen, Folder, Back Up and Restore, Share Manager, and Task Changer. I don’t want to get too into what each part does, but basically you can do things like add even more grid layouts, loop pages, control background blur, change the popup folder type, customize the sharing panel, and probably my favorite of the bunch, change the way the Task Manager looks and feels.

Good Lock

Next up is the One Hand Operation + app, which technically, you can download without installing Good Lock. This app adds a swipe point to both the left and right edges of your display that you can use to activate shortcuts for easier one-handed use. For instance, you can use it as a swipe to back a page while browsing or use it to activate the task switcher with just a swipe. You can also use it as a shortcut for other apps. Basically, it’s a must-have for those using the Galaxy S21 + or the Galaxy S21 Ultra and makes it much easier to use both devices one-handed.

Good Lock

Another favorite is the MultiStar app. This one is actually super useful if you use the Multi window function. What it does is extend functionality and makes the experience more customizable. With this app, you can quick launch the multi window by just holding down the recents key. You can also use that to open each app as a pop-up window as well. You can also use this app to enable multi window for all apps, though some apps may behave strangely from this. This can also hide the status and navigation bars in split screen view.

If you want to customize the UI more than what you can normally do with just One UI, then you should enable Lockstar, Quickstar, NavStar, and Clockface. These four apps let you customize the look of various things. Lockstar customizes your lock screen and lets you move the clock, notification panel, and other aspects to anywhere on the screen and not just the presets. Quickstar is used to customize the quick panel and the notification bar. NavStar lets you create your own navigation bar with different icons. Clockface is used to make custom clocks for the lock screen or the AOD screen.

Lastly, there are other apps that are in the Good Lock family that can be downloaded and installed apart from the Good Lock app. An example of this is the One Hand Operation + app I mentioned above. These apps mainly consist of creating themes, moving wallpapers, and custom keyboards. There’s also an app to customize the features for the S-Pen and Air Commands.

So with all that said, Good Lock is definitely something you need on your Galaxy S21 or any Samsung Galaxy phone for that matter. This collection of apps really does help fill those gaps in One UI that seem to be missing. Good Lock does a great job of making these apps feel like they came factory installed and you’ll appreciate the fact that you don’t need to install all of them, just the ones you want.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.