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3 eternal Samsung One UI firmware problems plaguing the company’s smartphones

One UI is the most successful shell from Samsung. While TouchWiz and Samsung Experience were considered very slow and their design raised questions, One UI was able to fix most of the shortcomings of its predecessors and become popular with a huge number of smartphone users. However, even now this shell has problems that move from version to version. In this article, I will cover three One UI issues and share my personal experience with the Galaxy A51, which I was lucky enough to experience last year.

Broken animations

The first and main problem for me personally is the animation curves found in different parts of the system. When I bought and started using the A51, I started to notice something was wrong – mainly in the settings when the Back button was pressed, as well as in other applications that use the system animation to perform this action. She felt torn. After activating the “For Developers” preferences item, I slowed down the animations and found that when I returned to the previous settings page, the animation simply disappeared halfway through its playback. Many people do not notice this, but personally it gave me terrible discomfort, and, as far as I know, this problem persisted in the third version of the shell. In addition, there are other more minor problems that are no less annoying – for example, the animation of opening a notification from the curtain, when instead of opening the application with a smooth transition, the entire screen is gradually filled with a solid color.

Function overload

Having the shell of its own features and chips is cool, but in the case of One UI, there were too many of them. I had to deal with the settings menu for a long time, although this did not happen with other shells from, for example, Xiaomi or OnePlus. Samsung has its own app store, where you can also find official programs from Samsung itself for setting up a smartphone – for example, an advanced equalizer. This is a great way to customize your smartphone as much as possible for yourself, and it would be more convenient if some of the functions were also available from this store, and everyone who needs certain chips could install them separately. In this case, other users would not have to dig through a ton of menus and submenus in order to find the desired item.

The shell lags on smartphones of budget series

If you pick up the Galaxy S21 and use it for a while, there will be no complaints about the smoothness and speed of One UI. But alas, in the case of smartphones A- and M-series, things are a little different. Having bought the A51, I did not expect the ideal speed and smoothness of the flagship level, I just wanted the normal pleasant operation of the interface, worthy of a mid-budget smartphone. Unfortunately, it turned out that then the A51 worked a little better than some Redmi 9A does now. Even the animations that were written normally ended up working tattered, and the slightest load on the system and the simultaneous execution of several tasks put my smartphone in a stupor. On the forums, they assured me that I was just finding fault, or they promised that everything would improve with the updates, but neither one nor the other turned out to be true. Perhaps the Galaxy A51 is working fine now, but enduring a year of terrible device performance until the right update arrives is clearly not what you expect from a mid-budget smartphone. So after a couple of updates that didn’t change anything, I sold the Galaxy A51 and bought another smartphone in the same price range that satisfied me with its work.

It is worth clarifying that this is by no means a matter of the Exynos processor or the amount of RAM. Enthusiasts installed third-party firmware on this smartphone and it immediately started working as it should – fine. Hence the conclusion that this problem is purely software, and if Samsung made enough effort to optimize its shell for a specific smartphone, then everything would work fine. However, now Samsung has a priority on flagships, and I strongly doubt that the situation will change in the near future.

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