Samsung Said to Make One UI 5 Smoother and Faster

The introduction of Samsung’s One UI back in 2018 was without a doubt a major moment for phone UIs. While that original version wasn’t without flaws, you know it won the world over when everyone from OnePlus to Google copied much of the way it looked. We’ve been fans of it from the beginning, but there is an area that has always been tough on the eyes and that’s in animations.

Samsung’s One UI is very open-y and close-y. Things are constantly zooming and flowing and expanding and minimizing at an excessive level. In fact, the animation bloat was bad enough that Samsung was at one point including a feature called “Reduce Animations,” almost as if they knew it was over-the-top.

It’s hard to state how much that feature reduced everything, but we always recommended you turn it on. And then one day, Samsung removed it! Now, if you want to reduce animations, you have to enable developer options and make adjustments to the animation scales of the phone. That’s not difficult to do, but we don’t love that Samsung took away that simple option we previously had.

Anyways, in a bit of good and related news, SamMobile is under the belief that Samsung is about to significantly improve the UI speed in One UI 5.0. Their sources suggest that one of the main items on the One UI 5 agenda will be to improve UI navigation speeds and also animations, so that they are smoother and faster. Faster and smoother is obviously a good thing, especially with the big ass high refresh rate displays they keep putting in phones.

We don’t have official launch timing for One UI 5, but Samsung tends to push out their new One UI updates along with the next version of Android. For example, we got One UI 4 with Android 12 in beta before it rolled out to all of Samsung’s best phones before the end of 2021. Should Samsung host another Samsung Developer Conference in the fall, that could also be a good spot to see the new One UI.

Finally, while we hopefully have the attention of someone in Samsung’s orbit – can we get a vertical app drawer already? It’s long past time to have made the switch for us, Samsung.