Hello, since switching to iodé on my Samsung s10e happened some weeks ago, I thought it would make sense to tell of the experience coming from Samsungs system to iodé OS from a near normal user perspective on usability. (My previous system wasn’t rootet or tuned in some way, but I debloated some apps via adb.)
Android - Samsung vs Iodé
- toggle modes: silent, vibrate, loud - but that may be due to LineageOS
- but one can tap to display a selector of which profile to use - this takes a lot more taps, but it’s also a bit more capable since it’s setting profiles and not only ring modes.
- in the other hand: how to know which mode the phone is in? Is there really no way to add ringer mode to the quick shortcuts bar?
- green indicator for location is over battery percentage - that is not useful when switching the device on and the weather app for example is refreshing - I simply would like to know what percentage is left.
- app switcher:
- screenshot button is in the way, close all apps button is on the side, only visible after extra scrolling to the left, (why not put both buttons besides each other?)
- app switcher just zooms away but doesn’t move to previous app, no option to do so
- ah, I found out that tapping the button again moves directly to the previous app in app switcher (as could holding the ‘back’ button longer)
- launcher: cannot save icons (positions as a backup for example for restoring only this at a later time)
- Notification on display:
- is it really not provided to have edge lighting? Maybe that is a Samsung thing, but it is quite useful to have something a bit more unobtrusive than whole screen flashing.
- Edge lighting (Phones) does not hinder to read the notification from screen, and takes some more seconds than full screen flashing, which is also quite helpful.
- This project seems to include edge lighting: GitHub - ShaDisNX255/NcX_Stock
- Battery use:
- seems to be a bit better than stock Samsung
- but used as before with a handful of apps from Google store, battery drain is worse - like 10% during night in airplane mode.
- but I was able to minimize it to 1% by denying most apps the RUN_ANY_IN_BACKGROUND permission.
- I didn’t look so deep into the sources but wonder if there could still be some battery tweaks be applied, maybe things like alarmtimer: Minimize wakeup time · rainbowdashh/android_kernel_samsung_beyondlte@6a3589d · GitHub or PM / freezer: Reduce freeze timeout to 1 second for Android · rainbowdashh/android_kernel_samsung_beyondlte@16297ab · GitHub and some more via [ROM] [OneUI 6.1] [PORT] [14] ExtremeROM for Galaxy S10 series v1 | XDA Forums via Commits · Ocin4ever/EternityKernel · GitHub (also used by other roms like alarmtimer: Minimize wakeup time (1c30baad) · Commits · halogenOS / android_kernel_oneplus_sm8150 · GitLab etc.)
- On the other hand: battery saver doesn’t seem to dim display brightness, so I am going from 10 to 1 percent with full brightness.
- Bixby button
- can be set to some useful actions - that is totally nice. On Samsung, I used button mapper and uninstalled all Bixby stuff in order to get press-and-hold to activate the flashlight. It seems that for doing this I still need button mapper.
- Power button
- sometimes does not switch the screen off, especially when pressing it with the thumb and having the rest of the hand over the device. Sometimes it needs multiple tries to get the screen off.
- I found out that setting the power button to digital assistant seems to mitigate a lot of this, but not completely. (That’s a bit counter-intuitive, as it sounds )
- Power Menu / power off / restart
- pressing the power button longer does display the menu to power off/reboot etc. But selecting reboot or power off instantly does its action without asking for confirmation.
- It would be nice if it could be set to require PIN to reboot/power off like modern iPhones, but as I read at security - Require password to turn off for all Android devices - Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange that would eventually not make sense because of force-reboot via press-and-hold being not deactivatable.
- Camera app
- feels also like lo-fi, compared to Samsung, but that’s also due to LineageOS, I presume. I will try out gcam and other things…
- Gallery app
- as it seems this app uses
mtime
to sort images. That’s not helpful, now all of my photos are from the date I restored them.- I also was unable to set
mtime
to the values ofctime
via adb (at least now I know the difference between mtime and ctime)
- I also was unable to set
- as it seems this app uses
- Screen brightness
- ootb when set to automatic, it is much too bright for me indoors. This also adds to less runtime since the battery is used more.
- Is there somewhere a kind of offset to be set?
- Aurora Store doesn’t have a checkbox to disable updates for each app? Previously I had Google Maps at an older and snappier version, but now I cannot opt out of updates.
- App Icon shape: isn’t there a setting to leave it as is without enforcing a circle, square or whatever shape?
Of course there are also a lot of things that are better ootb in Iodé compared to Samsung stock ROM (That’s why we are here ) This is not to lament on bad things but rather to inspire easing the transition for users coming from other systems like Samsungs. Maybe some tiny things can be tuned…
Funny thing is that the Google Maps and eBay app both seem to not work.
The Here Maps app works mostly, but Gmaps doesn’t get to download any maps, even when totally unblocked and signed in with my account. Maybe I broke something here?
greetings