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Why people hate Touchwiz so much?

funkylogik said:
@Chrcol, try Neat Rom Lite mate. Touchwiz based but debloated plus some optional theming :thumbup:
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yeah will give it a try although sadly there is a fair few things of TW I also dont like :( What I really want is a AOSP rom with TW dialer/contacts or a TW rom with missing options.

I think the widget bar on the S3 TW is not that great, the keyboard I prefer aosp. One thing is baffling me tho. TW on the S2 is faster than TW on the S3, I am guessing its because samsung added many new features to the S3 TW. So the extra bloat has wiped out the extra power of the S3 and some more.

One thing is certian tho since playing with both the S2 and S3, my ace now feels like a snail to use, so as soon as I get a decent software setup I will be moving to one of the faster phones. My failsafe option if I cant get a ICS/JB setup I like is to just upgrade to the S2 on CM7.2.
 
I was playing with the s4 and it feels very slow compared to the s3 (and i did the usual changing animation speeds) so id say yeah, its probably TW getting bigger and bigger thats slowing things down. Having said that, i played with a Note 2 and it felt really fast :confused:
 
fartblossom said:
For me, it's just an issue of polish. I have a nexus 7 tablet, and it's sweet.
My S3, on the other hand, is constantly disappointing me.
I bought it for the expandable battery and love it for that, but at some point I'll probably start tinkering with custom roms to rid myself of touchwiz.

Want to see exactly what I mean? Set your alarm for a time between the top of the hour, X:00, and nine minutes after, X:09. Set it to be a "briefing" alarm. Then listen to your phone misread the time when it goes off.

Can't imagine apple or google having a problem reading a clock in english, but Samsung let it through and probably never even noticed.
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I find these comments really minor complaints. Personally, I find TW quite usable and in some ways superior to stock Android. In fact, you do not want to run the camera app of the stock Android. It pales compared to the TW app for the camera. There is no multi-window feature in stock Android, the comprehensive pull-down menu of settings and various other features of TW.

Between a stock Android S3/S4 and a TW version, I would always chose the TW. I do not like, of course, all the duplication that Samsung has introduced, but I do not have to use it.
 
ADRz said:
I find these comments really minor complaints. Personally, I find TW quite usable and in some ways superior to stock Android. In fact, you do not want to run the camera app of the stock Android. It pales compared to the TW app for the camera. There is no multi-window feature in stock Android, the comprehensive pull-down menu of settings and various other features of TW.

Between a stock Android S3/S4 and a TW version, I would always chose the TW. I do not like, of course, all the duplication that Samsung has introduced, but I do not have to use it.
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Good points :thumbup:. My personal take on it...

1) While the stock camera may be missing some software features, 99% of the time I take a photo its point, shoot, done. I don't mess with filters, timers, ect.

2) Samsung's multi window is so crippled by the app choices its pretty useless. I have to root to actually get access to any apps id want to use mutiwindow with.

3) Some of the additions of touchwiz were from customized stock android ROMs
They merely cherry picked a few from the development that was going on over in the AOSP side.

If you're simply looking at stock android versus stock touchwiz android, your points are very valid. However, id argue most people running Google android aren't running stock AOSP. They're running some flavor of custom ROM where camera software features, notification pulldown features, multi window features ect have been added without much of the bloat Touchwiz has.

When you allow that into the conversation, AOSP wins for me hands down.
 
Exactly Rxpert. Touchwiz is android based the same as all custom roms are (they all have their own enhancements on pure android. The thing with custom roms is that you can choose what meets your own needs whereas TW tries to cater for the whole planet's needs in one rom which makes it unnecessarily heavy which makes it sluggish even on the current flagship.
even if someone likes certain software enhancements in TW (some of them are excellent) they should use a stripped down custom version of TW containing only the things they use.
P.s, the pulldown toggles are all there in CM and AOKP and look a lot prettier.
I get what ADRz is sayin about the TW camera, if youre a photographer, it has more settings and is optimized for the hardware but like Rxpert, im a point n shoot typa dude and the android camera does fine.
Multi-window, i do miss that tbh but not enough to go back to a very fast device held back by a chunk of useless (to me) firmware :)
 
Indeed, you'd be amazed at what some AOSP roms have for features. JBSourcery on the Gnex for example is insane with how many it offers. But standard roms like AOKP, Eclipse, CarbonROM, ParanoidAndroid, and CyanogenMOD do offer quite a bit themselves and are available on your device.
 
I need to reflash that and give it a real chance. It had too much going on the first time I flashed it and I went back to cm because that's what I was used to.

Now that the gnex is my backup phone again I want to play around with it more
 
Rxpert83 said:
I need to reflash that and give it a real chance. It had too much going on the first time I flashed it and I went back to cm because that's what I was used to.

Now that the gnex is my backup phone again I want to play around with it more
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I personally loved it, but the battery life was just too sub par for everyday use. However it looks like the developers of that rom have moved on to bigger and better things in life.
 
Yeah, aosp ROMs on non nexus devices are usually hacked together and not necessarily the most optimised code for it because many of the drivers needed are proprietary

The devs have to reverse engineer these
 
Ah thanx guys :) coldnt these samsung employees who leak things like test firmware to sammobile etc just leak things like kernel source too? Like theres no custom kernels for TW 4.2 because theres no source.. why dont these employees leak things like that and the camera coding etc too?
Is it a cynical thing where samsung are "allowing" certain leaks but not others?
I think all OEM should embrace the 3rd party dev community... i dont see what harm it would do them :confused: theyre happy enough to use and profit from the aosp but give nothing back (samsung anyway). I think(?) Htc and definately Sony give a bit back?
 
Because if they leak things like camera source companies like HTC or lg can just put it into their skin or at least use the code to improve theirs.

Most of these drivers aren't actually owned by Samsung or the other phone manufacturers, so they'd likely be sued by the partys that actually own it.

Only the kernels are open source. Anything else is fair game to be proprietary
 
Rxpert83 said:
Because if they leak things like camera source companies like HTC or lg can just put it into their skin or at least use the code to improve theirs.

Most of these drivers aren't actually owned by Samsung or the other phone manufacturers, so they'd likely be sued by the partys that actually own it.

Only the kernels are open source. Anything else is fair game to be proprietary
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i guess man. I tend to forget that it is a cut-throat business for them.
What id like say samsung to do is make touchwiz with like an aroma installer at first boot that lets average joe just skip through the setup but someone more experienced can hit "advanced" and choose which parts of it they want to install. Like a "modular" OS or something :beer:




cybertec69 said:
I just use Nova Launcher:smokingsomb:, problem solved.
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That only replaces the launcher UI. touchwiz is the name of the whole operating system/firmware :thumbup:
 
Nova is just a launcher, it only solves the problem in part. The rest of the OS is going be the same, with the same issues with speed, etc.
 
funkylogik said:
S3 had the best specs out there when it was released and its easy enough to root and mod it :)
I think its fine for people to like or dislike TW, what i dont have much time for is people who moan about it and dont bother to change it
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I've only had my S3 for a few days now...and I can't say I dislike TouchWiz. I came from two HTC devices in the past, and I also like Sense as well.

Isn't TouchWiz just a launcher or does it go beyond that? It's so easy to run a different launcher that nobody should moan about TW's shortcomings.

So far, my biggest issue is that the colorful weather/clock widget doesn't work as nicely as the one HTC "invented". When I click on the clock portion, I am not sent to the Android clock options where I can set a countdown timer, stopwatch, or look at the world clock...or set alarms. That sucks as it was part of my daily work flow. I'm not planning to change away from TW at this point...I just need to learn the new way of doing things.

So how does one access the Android clock options on this phone running stock?
 
The launcher is really just the surface of it.

If it was just a launcher any carrier skin could be ported to any device

The problem is they are so engrained into the system (frameworks,ect) that you really have to start over from AOSP to truly get rid of any of them.
 
funkylogik said:
Exactly Rxpert. Touchwiz is android based the same as all custom roms are (they all have their own enhancements on pure android. The thing with custom roms is that you can choose what meets your own needs whereas TW tries to cater for the whole planet's needs in one rom which makes it unnecessarily heavy which makes it sluggish even on the current flagship.
even if someone likes certain software enhancements in TW (some of them are excellent) they should use a stripped down custom version of TW containing only the things they use.
P.s, the pulldown toggles are all there in CM and AOKP and look a lot prettier.
I get what ADRz is sayin about the TW camera, if youre a photographer, it has more settings and is optimized for the hardware but like Rxpert, im a point n shoot typa dude and the android camera does fine.
Multi-window, i do miss that tbh but not enough to go back to a very fast device held back by a chunk of useless (to me) firmware :)
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except I have yet to find a single AOSP ics/jb rom that has the dialer thats on the S3/S4 TW. the AOSP dialer is plain aweful, the dialer is so important that if I cant fix that then AOSP loses by default. What were google thinking with that dialer?

I am using now neatrom (tw based rom) on my S3 with the jkay framework, it is pretty sweet. the rom removes much of the samsung bloatware (s-voice etc.) jkay framework adds many of the aosp style changes as options such as crt-off. The rom allows any app to work with multi window. right now I have probably one or two issues left. I would love to have the dialtone sounds on the dialer pad that AOSP has. The second is I would like to use the vol up/down on the keyboard to move the cursor, I think prett much rest of the rom I am happy with, I expect an AOSP rom will still be faster but the S3 is pretty powerful and touchwiz doesnt seem slow as it used to be especially when debloated.

good news for S4 owners the jkay dev is now making his framework for the S4.
 
chrcol said:
except I have yet to find a single AOSP ics/jb rom that has the dialer thats on the S3/S4 TW. the AOSP dialer is plain aweful, the dialer is so important that if I cant fix that then AOSP loses by default. What were google thinking with that dialer?

I am using now neatrom (tw based rom) on my S3 with the jkay framework, it is pretty sweet. the rom removes much of the samsung bloatware (s-voice etc.) jkay framework adds many of the aosp style changes as options such as crt-off. The rom allows any app to work with multi window. right now I have probably one or two issues left. I would love to have the dialtone sounds on the dialer pad that AOSP has. The second is I would like to use the vol up/down on the keyboard to move the cursor, I think prett much rest of the rom I am happy with, I expect an AOSP rom will still be faster but the S3 is pretty powerful and touchwiz doesnt seem slow as it used to be especially when debloated.

good news for S4 owners the jkay dev is now making his framework for the S4.
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It dials, what's the problem with it?

You won't find anything touchwiz on aosp. That's part of the appeal
 
I used jkay for a while then used 3minit framework which is pretty cool with more customisation (when i used Neat) :thumbup:
Dialer isnt that important to me tbh but i like how the aokp/aosp one opens nearly instantly :)
 
Palmetto Fellow said:
I've only had my S3 for a few days now...and I can't say I dislike TouchWiz. I came from two HTC devices in the past, and I also like Sense as well.

Isn't TouchWiz just a launcher or does it go beyond that? It's so easy to run a different launcher that nobody should moan about TW's shortcomings.

So far, my biggest issue is that the colorful weather/clock widget doesn't work as nicely as the one HTC "invented". When I click on the clock portion, I am not sent to the Android clock options where I can set a countdown timer, stopwatch, or look at the world clock...or set alarms. That sucks as it was part of my daily work flow. I'm not planning to change away from TW at this point...I just need to learn the new way of doing things.

So how does one access the Android clock options on this phone running stock?
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Beautiful Widgets has all of those options for the clock.
 
I've tried a few different launchers recently, and find I'm always going back to Touchwiz after a few minutes or hours.

Rxpert83 said:
3) No red underline under misspelled text
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I've used a couple of non-Samsung phones, and that red-underline under words it thinks are misspelled annoyed me. It was like nearly every word, except a few simple ones like "in", "on" or "and". Couldn't see any way to turn it off.
 
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