If you want to customize the homescreen on the Samsung Galaxy S4, you’re in the right place.
Hey everyone, this is Mike, and in this post (and the clip, of course) I’ll give you some homescreen customization tips and tricks, starting with the basics, and continuing with more advanced methods, like using launchers, custom widgets and so on.
First, you get a couple of basic ways to switch between homescreens on the S4. You can swipe between them to the left or to the right. Then, you can jump directly to a screen by tapping the little dot-shaped icons at the bottom or tap and swipe through the dots to change between screens quicker. And third, you can just pinch the screen and you will get these home icons, each representing one of your homescreens. From here, you can quickly jump to one of them, or you can rearrange the screens’ order. You can also add a new screen and delete an existing one. And last but not least, you can change the main home screen, by hitting that house like icon on top of it.
Moving on, you can change your homescreens wallpaper. For that, tap and hold on any free area of the screen, and from that menu navigate to wallpapers. Here you can choose between your regular wallpapers, the animated Live ones or just choose any picture from the gallery. You can’t assign different wallpapers to each homescreen by default, but you can do that if you’re using a launcher.
Then, it’s time to add widgets, apps and folders to your homescreen. Adding apps is quite easy, go to the app drawer, hit and hold an app and then place it on the homescreen. For widgets, you will have to get to the Widgets tab in the App Drawer and also hit and hold a widget, and then place it.
You can also press and hold an existing widget to be able to remove it from the homescreen or to resize it, if it allows it. Last but not least, in order to create folders, you just have to hit the menu button on any homescreen and tap Add Folder, and after that just drag and drop the applications inside the folder.
Of course, these are just some basic homescreen customizations tips. You can also download new themes and widgets from Google Play, but if you want to fully change your S4, you’ll have to instal some launchers. You can find them in the store as well, and I’d suggest looking at Nova or Apex, which are my favorite Android launchers right now.
I have a more thorough clip about launchers below, so you should definitely check it out.
But long story short, launchers allow you to change the grid size of your home screens, to overlay apps and widgets, to add different animations when changing between home screens, to customize the row of docked apps at the bottom and many other. See the clip for more details.
Alright, that’s about it for now. Hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed those clips above and if you have any questions or anything you might want to add, post your comments below.
