How to customize your Samsung Galaxy home screen with icon packs
One UI 4added a feature that was strangely absent from Samsung’sAndroid skin for a long time — icon pack support. Sure, you could download and use custom icons from the Galaxy Store, but most downloads only covered a few major apps, so it wasn’t worth the trouble. With One UI 4 finally allowing you to get more fully-featured icon packs from the Play Store, let’s take a look at the process of applying them to some of thebest Android phonesout there.
How to apply custom icon packs
Before we begin, we should clarify that while we refer to this as a One UI 4 feature, it was introduced in One UI 3.1.1. That version was exclusive to foldable phones, though, so icon packs have only really made it to the majority of Samsung phones with One UI 4.
How to download your first icon pack
First, you’ll need to download an app called Theme Park on a Samsung phone, like theSamsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. If you have installed theGood Lockapp, you can find Theme Park in the list of modules and download it from there. If you haven’t installed the app, you can head to the Galaxy Store and download the Theme Park app; there’s no need to download Good Lock first. Once the app is installed:
In addition to support for third-party icon packs, it’s possible to also adjust the shape of your adaptive icons — like you can do on Pixels running Android 11 — and change the color of the masks behind said icons. This can be done before or after you add an icon pack, but you’ll only be able to change the shape of icons that weren’t included in the pack if you previously installed one.
How to change the size of an icon
If you find One UI’s icons to be a little large, you could shrink them with Theme Park. The largest icon size is the default, so you can’t make them any bigger than what you get out of the box.
How to change the icon for a specific app
If you want to change the icon for a specific app, doing so is easy.
How to apply your custom theme
Now that you have a theme ready you’ll need to apply it by following these steps:
It’ll take a moment to apply the icon pack, and thenyou’ll be back on your home screen, staring at your lovely new icons. One of the bonuses of applying icons using this method over a third-party launcher is that it’s system-wide, so you’ll see the new icons in the overview menu, edge panel, and even the apps section of theSettingsapp. Third-party launchers still don’t play well with gesture navigation in my experience, so being able to do this in the stock launcher is a major boon for users like myself.
How to go back to stock icons
If you decide you want to go back to the stock icons, the process is simple. Just reopen Theme Park, tap on the icon pack that’s currently applied, and then taprelease.
If you think this would be much easier if it were baked into the launcher or settings app instead of Theme Park, you’re right. Having to download an app that isn’t even available in all regions isn’t the best experience. Thankfully we don’t think it will be this way forever. Samsung has a track record of testing experimental features in Good Lock modules before baking them right into future versions of One UI. One UI 4 added the ability to customize your share sheet, something that was already possible back in One UI 2 with Good Lock.
It’s likely Samsung will add icon theming to One Ui in the not-too-distant future.If you’d rather not wait, Theme Park can be downloaded from theGalaxy Store.
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