Every Android phone brand likes to do their own thing when it comes to the launcher and the overall look of their phones. Some (like Xiaomi) prefer to make their phones look and feel more like Apple’s iOS, but Samsung has spent years and years developing One UI.
Like most people, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with One UI. Samsung falls into the trap of inflating their phones with gimmicky features that no one uses. That said, One UI has gotten pretty decent out of the box in recent years. However, there are a few things that I turned off right after turning on my new Samsung phone for the first time.
RAM Plus
More negative if you ask me
There’s a global RAM crisis right now as I write this, but phones have been a little short on RAM for longer than that. Android has a heavier total memory footprint than iOS because Apple uses fairly aggressive memory management, but Samsung said “hold my beer” and found what the swap file for your phone is.
It’s called “RAM Plus” and it’s on by default. It stores a portion of your phone’s SSD as extended virtual RAM, but it has its problems. As reported by our friends at XDA, RAM Plus can slow down your phone. If their phone has more than 8GB of RAM, most people won’t even need it.
Disabling RAM Plus will not harm your phone in any way. So try using your phone without it. You may find it’s faster, and unless you get apps complaining about RAM or crashing or low memory warnings, you probably don’t need this feature.
Go here to turn it off Settings > Device Care > Memory > RAM Plus either reduce the amount or preferably disable the feature.
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Samsung
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Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
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Customization Service
Spyware designed just for you
The Samsung Personalization Service It’s a very polite name for a set of “features” on Samsung phones that allow the company to track and record what you do with your phone, and then use it for direct marketing and various other purposes.
It’s easy to “accidentally” enable this during your phone’s initial setup, so there’s a good chance it will work on your phone. I think this kind of thing is the same ACR technology spying on TVs. I’d rather the device I paid a lot of money for doesn’t collect and share my data.
Go here to turn it off or at least customize it for your own convenience Settings > Accounts > Samsung account > Security & privacy > and tap Customization Service entry.
Toggle the switch above to turn them all off, then select Hold on to confirm. Your phone may alert you that it is turning off the tracking of sleep data, which is necessary for the battery conservation function. If you really can’t live with that, you can enable the general service, but scroll down to the bottom of the page and at least disable the direct marketing link.
Scene Optimizer in the camera app
I prefer natural or more
One of the biggest advantages of Samsung Galaxy phones is the excellent camera system. Personally I i love macro photography and for the most part, the automation in Samsung’s camera app is more helpful than annoying. However, one feature I tend to turn off is the “scene optimizer”, or at least that’s what it used to be called.
On my S25 Ultra it is found under Camera Settings > Photo Enhancer > Scene Detection.
It uses artificial intelligence to understand what object or scene you’re pointing the camera at and tries to automatically adjust your settings to suit it. If you like the way it looks on your photos, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, I prefer to root things myself.
Raise to wake
my eyes!
Samsung’s phones have a few gesture features that can be useful, but I turn off Raise to Wake because it’s generally more annoying than useful. At least to me.
The idea is simple. When the phone detects you’ve picked it up, it will activate the screen, but in the end, there are more scenarios where I pick up my phone and don’t need the screen to activate as opposed to the other way around. In any case, I use the Always-On Display feature on my phone, which means I don’t need the screen to light up to check the time, for example. Especially if I move the screen, I don’t need my eyes to be blinded by blinking in the dark.
Go here to turn it off Settings > Advanced Features > Motions and gestures > Raise to wake. Tapping an option will turn it on or off.
Side panels
Remove the small tab
Added by Samsung to make access to frequent features easier Side panels For One UI. These work like a dock or taskbar on a desktop system. There is a small icon that appears on the edge of the screen and when you swipe over it, it shows a shortcut menu.
Go here to turn them off Settings > Display > Sidebars.
While some people might find it really useful, I find the little tab visually annoying and I never use sidebars. Therefore, it makes sense to turn them off. The app folders in the main quick access bar at the bottom of the screen are more than enough for my needs, and I suspect most people reading this will be as well.
