After more than a month of repeated tweaks and a series of major bugs, the official version of One UI 4 finally reopened push at the end of December and caught up with the previous estimated progress within a few days.
At present, the S21 series, Note 20 series and Z series of the third generation of new products can already experience the complete body of the new system, in addition to the system version upgrade to Android 12, One UI 4 also brought a large and small nearly 80 functional updates. In this article, I'll pick up some of the more important changes and briefly introduce the new atmosphere brought by One UI 4 before the S22 series arrives.
This article is based on Z Flip3 and BNC S21 writing, the actual experience may vary in different models, subject to the actual function update.
Closely following Material You, but still full of stars
The design style of the One UI has always been very recognizable, and the classic Squircle icon is easy to see at a glance. But at the same time, it can also keep up with google's various new design standards, such as the Android 11 frosted glass effect introduced in One UI 3. The Material You theme color picking system introduced by Android 12 in Pixel devices was also successfully used by One UI 4.
One UI 4 has a built-in feature called "Color Palette", which will pop up after setting the wallpaper to set the system accent color in the form of automatic color picking.
After testing, you can now observe the changes brought about by global color adjustments within your phone, calculator, contacts, settings, clock, reminders, my files, messages, and smart manager. However, due to the fact that the Current One UI does not use the native Android 12 color block-based design, the most intuitive result of automatic color picking is only presented in the system settings of the switch and the system application in the default launcher of the icon color, as well as the notification bar shortcut switch button, lock screen and AOD clock font color - but the latter options even in the previous versions of the One UI can be manually adjusted through the system settings, so the current One UI 4 presents the effect more like the theme color Automation. The new app icon in Pixel Launcher is also not supported for long-press menu color picking, and the frosted glass effect is still continued.
Interestingly, we randomly tested a subset of third-party apps that worked with Material Design, the icon for live wallpaper app Doodle, the app interface for the note-taking app Bundled Notes, and the interface and widgets for the local player Auxio to fit the palette. However, the Google family bucket highlighted in the Article on the Android Platform: Material You Application Awards is completely unsuitable, making people guess that Google is quietly doing tricks on Mimi.
Chrome, you look at the little circle of the Doodle, you look at you again!
Widgets with a more unified look and feel
As one of the main update points of Android 12, many apps have adapted to the new design, providing more lively widgets, including many Samsung system software, and more use of card backgrounds has also allowed widgets from different apps to have a unified visual language.
Similar to native Android 12, One UI 4 enforces a uniform rounded corner for all widgets, making the overall look and feel more consistent. And the interface for adding widgets has also been greatly improved, in addition to making recommendations at the top of the screen, the list classified by software has greatly improved the utilization of screen space, compared to the corresponding interface in One UI 3 is undoubtedly an improvement. It is worth mentioning that the fillets of one UI 4 widgets have been adjusted to the angle and have not copied the original design.
The startup and exit animations of the desktop widget have also been optimized, so that the gradient of the animation finally conforms to the laws of physics, rather than simply full-screen fade-in and fade-out.
A hierarchical notification center
Unlike android 12 on the Pixel, the upgrade of the notification center between One UI 3 and 4 in the style layout is not much, and the most intuitive thing for the naked eye is that the brightness slider changes from a thin line to a long strip bubble style, and is filled by the secondary color in the system color table, (in some color schemes) can be significantly compared with other activated shortcut switches at the top. As for whether the notification center of the original Android 12 color is more coordinated or the hierarchical notification center in One UI 4 is more eye-catching, it is the wisdom of the wise.
More natural movements, clearer visual cues
The desktop animation of one UI has been relatively perfect, whether it is the bounce when exiting the application or the mask expansion of the application opening has been relatively comprehensive and coherent, and the main thing brought by following the One UI 4 is the bottom elastic animation of Android 12 in the system menu.
In addition to the aforementioned widget animations, the charging animation of the new system is now not only more visually impactful, but also intuitively indicates whether it is "fast charging" or "super fast charging" with different lightning bolt icons, which is more recognizable than the One UI 3 in color differences. The center of the charging ring has also changed from the original fixed translucent gray to a real-time Gaussian blur on the background screen, which to a certain extent eliminates the abruptness of the previous charging animation.
Left: One UI 3 charging interface; Medium: One UI 4 fast charging; Right: One UI 4 ultra-fast charging is more open, but not complete icon pack support
Since Samsung's GoodLock plugin occupies a large section of various "One UI User Manuals", the outstanding customization ability of One UI has become the mainstay of Samsung's reputation. However, until One UI 3.1, changing the icon on Samsung's default desktop was a rather tedious operation, and sometimes even needed to be solved through root. Now this problem has also been perfected in One UI 4, and with the theme park plugin in GoodLock, we can finally change the icon configuration of the system launcher directly.
However, although Samsung has opened up the interface of applying third-party icon packs to the default launcher through theme park plugins, it does not allow mix-and-match and substitution between different icon packs, and even does not replace the missing icons in the icon packs with pre-made themes. Therefore, when encountering some icon packs that are not well adapted, you will encounter this large blank situation:
More convenient privacy protection settings
More significant sensitive permissions call records
As Android 12 further tightens the control over some privacy permissions on mobile phones, the level of some system menus has also changed. In the privacy menu of One UI 4, a new request count for all system-sensitive permissions has been added to show the total number of apps that have used cameras, microphones, and GPS positioning in the last 24 hours, and you can see the schedule of permission usage by clicking in, basically following the layout design in Android 12.
Camera and microphone permission control at the touch of a button
Another popular feature is the green camera and microphone in the upper right corner to call the indicator light in real time, compared with android 12 on the Pixel, Samsung has originally retained the boot logic and animation of the permission indicator. Camera and microphone access buttons can also be added to the Quick Settings panel. Unlike the previous sensors Off switch, which was hidden in developer mode, the app can still work when access is turned off via Quick Settings/Privacy, but the captured camera/microphone data is empty.
Although it is a perfectly reasonable strategy to copy it, we still hope that Samsung can make some improvements based on the original system: such as using different colored indicators to mark the camera, microphone and GPS calls, and whether it is necessary to improve the problem that the indicators on the green wallpaper are not obvious enough.
Other useful little features
Skip the alarm only once
Although this feature is not exclusive to One UI 4, it is still very heartwarming that the system has these small features that are close to the user's habits. On the basis of the original holiday alarm clock, the One UI will pop up a small switch below after you close an alarm that has been turned on, asking if you want to turn the alarm clock on again tomorrow - thus effectively avoiding "I'm sorry!" Forgot to turn on the alarm clock".
Force unsaturated charging
The unsaturated charging feature inherited from the S Tab and Folding Screen series is now also coming to the S Series, effectively avoiding potential damage caused by saturating the battery for a long time by limiting the maximum number of charges directly to 85%.
These are the most noteworthy updates from One UI 4. At present, One UI 4 is still in the adjustment stage, and we can also see that the new features of Android 12 and the visual style of One UI have not been fully integrated, and some models still have bugs that have not been fixed. According to the current revelations, the S22 series models will be released around February 9, and it is hoped that the system update after February will bring more perfect One UI 4 to Samsung users.
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