Samsung Galaxy phones finally switch to vertically scrolling app drawer in One UI 7

After years of sticking with an app drawer that uses pages, Samsung is finally bringing a vertically scrolling app drawer to Galaxy smartphones with its new One UI 7 update.

Vertically scrolling app drawers have become the standard across virtually every flavor of Android, but Samsung has stuck to its guns for a while with an app drawer that relies on separate pages to house your apps. There have been modifications to change this, such as using a third-party launcher or Samsung’s Good Lock, but officially, it was always this horizontal, objectively slower experience.

Finally, that’s changing.

With the launch of its One UI 7 beta today, Samsung has introduced a vertically scrolling app drawer to Galaxy devices. The homescreen defaults to this new experience and, notably, it’s not optional. There are no settings that can be tweaked to go back to a horizontally scrolling, paginated view.

We did notice that Samsung still seems to default to a view where apps aren’t listed vertically, but there’s an option to change between the “custom” or “alphabetical” sorting views.

Other settings you can use to adjust the homescreen and app drawer include changing either view to have five columns instead of four, or to turn off the app drawer entirely and go for an iOS-like homescreen-only experience (though why anyone would do sign up for that is beyond my understanding). You can also now adjust app icon sizes, turn off app labels, and turn on labels for widgets.

What do you think of this change? Do you prefer pages in the app drawer?

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