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Nova Launcher vs Touchwiz

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bubsy54

Lurker
I just picked up a Galaxy S5, coming from an S3,and i never used another launcher other than Touchwiz, but i think i really want to after seeing some of the customizing that can be done.

I tried out Buzz launcher and Nova launcher, and i think I've settled on nova since it seemed to be a lot more stable and used up less resources.

My concern with nova is that i might lose some features from Touchwiz that i might use but not realize. I don't really use the gesture features from touchwiz such as turning the phone upside down to mute music, but i tested the function while in Nova and it seemed to work.

I really don't know what i might be using of touchwiz in particular, but i don't want to be missing out on anything... All i really want to do is change my app icon images and this seemed to be the best way.

So long story short : should i expect the features of touchwiz to work within nova? And is it safe (security wise) to use a third party launcher?

Thanks for any help!
 
Hello, bubsy54, welcome to Android Forums! :)

Nova is one of the more popular launchers and is perfectly safe to use, security wise. While you may lose some of the TouchWiz features, many can be taken care of with an app of it's own. Mind you, some of TouchWiz is baked into the rom of Galaxy devices, so you'll never really be able to get rid of them ... the notification pull down, for example.

The nice part is if you end up missing the features, you can always just switch back with almost no effort or impact to your phone.
 
Thanks both of you, I'm glad to be a part of the forums (should have joined a while ago)

It's good to hear that it is safe to use.

I'll give the prime version a chance and see what i can come up with. And like you said lunatic59,i can always revert back to touchwiz if i see that i am missing a much needed feature.

Thanks again
 
So i thought I'd share a screenshot of what i was able to come up with using Nova Launcher, thanks again for reassuring me to use it

Only thing i found that touchwiz does that nova can't do is display the number of messages i have in the corner of my apps... I know there is an app for it, but i don't feel like installing more stuff
 

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Other than changing your home screens and app drawer, a 3rd party launcher wont affect anything so youll keep all the samsung touchwiz features
 
Nova can use Tesla Unread Counts or Missed It! as it unread counts provider. Nova Prime has some extra things like gestures. I also like how first press of home shows main home screen and 2nd press can be configured for all kinds of things (mine takes me to page 1 of my home screen stack). I keep my most used apps on page 1 and 3 and toggle between them with alternate presses of home button. I am sure there are other differences between Nova Prime and Nova Free but I can't recall them.
 
I use nova launcher to emulate touchwiz XD

It's basically what it should have been, 10000000000x faster and I even get the lollipop "slide up" animation without having to root my phone and install a custom build :P
 
Iv used nova launcher prime as my only launcher for the last 2-3 years but I just bought a galaxy note 4 running a much faster and less boggled version of touchwiz on kitkat 4.4.4 and it's soo much better than before.

it actually runs so much better than touchwiz of old, like on my S4 which used to be super sluggish at times.

The only area where the note 4 is known to have a slight laggy 1-2 delay is when pressing the recent-apps touch key next to the home button, and iv tested the speed of the recent apps popping up on Nova, Google now launcher, apus and some others and none really do a better job. There's always a slight delay, hopefully samaung can optimize the software to work with the hardware better as time goes on. Nothings perfect in life.

Anyway touchwiz looks really good to me now and while there's room for improvement, they've done enough to keep one customer from going back to a 3rd party launcher For now. All the gestures and shortcuts I need come via gravitybox and other modules like xposed since my device is rooted, theres way more room for customization than just using a launcher unrooted.
 
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