Samsung Good Lock

This is something that every Samsung S6/Edge/Edge+/Note 5/S7/S7 Edge/S7 Edge+ user should get. It's in the Galaxy Apps app, from Samsung themselves. You're also going to need Marshmallow or later.

Basically what it does is sidestep the SystemUI from your carrier and use almost stock UI. The lockscreen is updated and the home-screen UI is also updated. It uses the AOSP status bar icons and it uses the Material Design notification shade (with some sensible modifications). It's really great actually. I was impressed. I was really happy that it also gets rid of the "AT&T" in the status bar when you don't have notifications. So much cleaner.

 

How's the RAM usage versus TouchWiz? I have the Note 5.

 

I haven't noticed any additional usage past the old version, but then I don't watch RAM usage much. Android is mature enough to manage itself.

 

Yeah well I get annoyed when every time I run chrome and two games, each game gets cleaned from memory because of TouchWiz eating up so much. There's no reason a 3GB phone should be closing games a 1GB iPad Air can run without closing. I can run Tapped Out, Scatter Slots, and Angel Stone all at once on the iPad while my Note shuts down Tapped Out and Scatter Slots after awhile.

 

There's a fundamental difference in how iOS handles RAM management vs Android, but the main thing to remember is that Apple has had the upper hand (by quite a bit) in storage speeds for a LOOONG time now. Especially so with the new 6S/iPad Pro with NVMe storage. So even if Apple does suspend it to NAND, it takes a far shorter amount of time to pull back into RAM than Android does. Apple bought P.A. Semi and Anobit specifically to focus on CPU fab speciality, and NAND (Anobit).

That is changing though. Google is working very seriously on NAND read/write speeds, especially in regards to encrypted storage read/write.

 

The iPad Air doesn't have faster NAND than the Note 5.

I get 224MB/sec writes and 613MB/sec reads in Passmark while the iPad Air has a lowly 34.6MB/sec write and 102MB/sec read in the same app.

Memory speeds -
iPad Air: 503MB/sec write, 601MB/sec read
Note 5: 743MB/sec write, 2033MB/sec read

My Note stomps the Air on every metric except data encryption which is well known to be better on the Apple side.

Again, if it wasn't for TouchWiz, all my apps would be ready to go at all times. My Note is even plugged in so it throttled from heat (rapid charging) and it still kicked the crap out of the iPad Air across the board.

 

I'm glad that they kept quick-toggles on the notification shade instead of solely relying on you going to a second shade for your quick-toggles. That's one area where I think Touchwiz is definitely better than vanilla Android.

 

Two different OS's handle RAM management completely different. It's not touchwiz. It would do the same thing on a Nexus 6P. Also, I guess you have first gen Air?

I don't know what you're doing with your Note, but mine has never even heated up. Not even a little. To say yours gets so hot it throttles... wow. What's your carrier/OS version?

And just to nitpick, the Note 5 has 4GB of LP-DDR4.

 

First two images was a run after using the phone for nothing but browsing in Chrome. Third was after a total reboot, all apps closed, phone idle for 15 minutes. Out of curiosity, I ran the benchmark again immediately after and it went back to 66k.

I've seen this phone hit 89C on all cores and three or four times its actually purple lighted (forced reboot due to 105C thermal protection being triggered - bright purple light stays on for somewhere around 10 seconds while it cools down and then it boots up).

T-Mobile - 6.0.1

And yes, iPad Air 16GB.

 

Here's the AnTuTu 15 minute stress test... Note the dramatic performance drop and how early it happens.



I'm not the only one who has had problems with the Exynos 7420 throttling like crazy either.

 

So which kernel are you running? Also, Xposed framework? Custom stuff?

Also, just for gigs I installed a few games on my Note 5. It did warm up after playing for a while, but compared to my G4 is was amazing. Only marginally warm, really. My G4 would literally bake itself.

IDK if you got a bad bin with your Exynos 7420 and yours is running higher voltages or what... but I do not have those issues whatsoever.

 

Stock modified kernel (just a few fixes, it runs just as hot with the regular kernel) and my chip is a 6 bin if I remember correctly. I don't use Xposed or any of that garbage. I really primarily use root to restore apps and data.

 

Something non-standard is causing your heat issues... just my $.02.

I had some massive issues, even with stock non-rooted software on several S5's, but nothing with the Note.

Also, Good Lock was just updated the other day. Another huge update. The colors are now more customizable, there's more options for the notification shade, and more options for lock screen widgets and such. What I'm really amazed with is that someone at Samsung is actually listening to customer feedback in the app reviews.

 

About a month after I got the S7 Edge, this auto-installed.

The new notification and quick-toggle screen is attractive and highly customizable. I like it. Looks more like vanilla, but without a second swipe necessary to get to the brightness slider and your most frequently-used toggles, plus you can customize the color scheme.

Curiously, this appears to have broken the TouchWiz ability to have different wallpapers for the lock screen and home screen.

The "new recents" panel SUCKS compared to the card-style default multitasking. Just a list of app names with no thumbnails. Thank goodness it can be disabled in Good Lock advanced settings.