Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
When Samsung releases new versions of One UI, it usually breaks some of the Good Lock modules I use every day. The One UI 8.5 beta is no exception — several Good Lock modules have been incompatible since the beta started, including Home Up. Home Up is a module that lets you tweak everything from your home screen icons to the overview menu. Samsung recently updated Home Up, and it does more than make it compatible with the latest version of One UI — it adds new features that have made my favorite Good Lock module better than ever.
Do you use Home Up? 29 votes Yes 59 % No 28 % I don't have a Samsung phone 14 %
Widget resize
Widget resize Widget resize off Widget resize on
Home Up has been able to resize app icons for a long time now, and this update extends the same functionality to widgets. On all of my Samsung devices, I set the screen zoom to the smallest size because I find a lot of the UI elements in One UI to be too big. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that a lot of widgets, Google’s search bar included, don’t scale correctly and look tiny, as you can see in the second image above.
The new version of Home Up has a “Widget setting” menu that lets you increase the scaling of widgets in the home screen, which has resolved the issue I have with the search bar, as seen in the third photo. You can also remove the blur effect from Samsung’s first-party widgets from this menu, which is a nice touch if you don’t like how that looks.
Direct Share exclusions
Direct share settings Exclude shortcuts Direct Share menu
Direct Share is a part of the share menu in One UI. It suggests contacts from across your apps that you frequently share things with, and it intelligently remembers what types of files are often shared with which contact. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, I find that it seldom suggests the right person, and I totally ignore it. For a long time, Home Up has let you pick favorite Direct Share targets, letting you pin the chats you use most for quick access. The Home Up update takes this further by adding an exclusion list. As the name suggests, this means you can block individual chats and share targets from ever appearing.
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