Samsung’s latest beast, the Galaxy S 4, with its 1.9GHZ quad-core Snapdragon 600 should be the fastest device you’ve ever used. But sadly, for a lot of people, this simply isn’t the case. Whether the issue is one of perception, or if there’s something wrong under-the-hood, the device seems quite laggy a lot of the time, and it can certainly tarnish your experience of the device, as I have personally found.
Fortunately, through a long and tedious process of trial, error and reading far too many XDA threads, I’ve found some things you can do to really help with lag:
- If you haven’t already, enable developer options. Although on the Galaxy S 4, you’ll have to take the extra step of going to the ‘More’ tab once you’re in the settings application.
- In the developer options, scroll down to ‘Window animation scale’. Set this to 0.5x, and repeat for ‘Transition animation scale’ and ‘Animator duration scale’.
- Double-tap the home button to launch S-Voice. Then hit the menu button and open up settings. Uncheck the box marked ‘Open via the home key’. This will disable the double-click of the home button to launch S-Voice, which should reduce the lag when pressing home. If, for some reason you actually want to use S-Voice, you can access it from the application tray.
- Download Quickpic from the Play Store. Never open Samsung’s gallery again.
- If you’ve gone ahead and rooted your Galaxy S 4, install CyanogenMod. You’re welcome.
Hopefully that’ll help. I know it’s really made my Galaxy a lot faster and even though I still see the occasional lag, it doesn’t interfere with how I use the phone any more. Now we just have to wait until Samsung rolls out an OTA update that will make the device really fly.
Brilliant! Changing those animation settings has radically improved the performance of my Samsung S4. Thank you!
Thanks. Now I love my Samsung galaxy s 4. It’s really helps.
To remove lag just use the options of gpu in developers option and limit the process to 4, that fixed it for me.
This has helped so much! Thank you
There is an update for the s3 generic australian 12mb of bug fixes. They now remove the contact photo in the call log. Call log now open very quick. I think I’ve seen improvement to the gallery load time as well.
Works on my GS3.
Thanks.
as usual the first batch of new phones usually hve bugs and lag and all my s4 came from a second batch and i havent seen any lag the phone runs really smoothly and very fast and responsive
Rubbish! The SAME issue that affected the S3 still affects this behemoth of a phone. Animation scale and transition scale should be able to be on 1.0, 1.5 or any other realistic scale and still appear smooth. Update your overlay Samsung. I don’t have these issues on ASOP inspired roms
Are you saying that the tips don’t help, or that you shouldn’t need them? If the latter, I completely agree with you. The hardware in the S4 should be powerful enough to run even Honeycomb smoothly, but Samsung have really dropped the ball with their software. I’m absolutely certain that a ROM built from AOSP would perform much better.
thanks a lot, it worked a bit
Thanks James. Your solutions have made it super quick almost similar to my nexus 4 in many instances. Long live Ausdroid 😉
Thanks!
Just did this to a gn2 and its now faster, thanks for the heads ups
I’m amazed anyone bothers with touchwiz .. seriously .. my launcher gets switched to go launcher ex first thing when I get a new phone. ( takes about 2 minutes to install ) As for the all the HTC fanboys in this thread .. lets have a look at over all phone sales in a few months and see whos on top. Don’t get me wrong the One is a great phone .. if it weren’t for its camera, lack of expandable storage and removable battery I probably would’ve gotten one .. but HTC continue to insist on being the… Read more »
I was a big Go Launcher EX fan as well until recently when my RAZR HD became almost unusable. Incredible lags on everything from scrolling to even keyboard opening to high battery drainage… Noticed the high RAM usage and decided to get rid of it (and the rest of the Go tools except the Backup one). The phone has improved unbelievably, I mean, I’m speechless. It is quite snappy (not without slight lag but nothing like before) and the battery life is amazing. I’d say it uses about 25% less battery now. I really didn’t think it would make such… Read more »
Go Launcher has never really interested me. I’ve tried it, but I just wasn’t able to feel its vibe. If you’re looking for alternative launchers, I’d recommend either Action Launcher or Nova. Nova’s built from the AOSP launcher, so it’ll probaly be pretty familiar (and has a free version), but Action Launcher is something else.
Anything but Touchwiz though.
i have the htc one and the sgs4, and i have to say camera wise i’m not impressed with the sgs4. the htc ones pictures turn out much clearer and stay crisp when you zoom in, as well as not having issues with blurring. my sgs4 pictures so far have not been able to compare as far as crispness, blurring factor, and they aren’t nearly as nice when i zoom in. also the night/dark pictures taken on the htc one are much better than my sgs4’s.
LOL @ #4
I AM SO GOING TO WORK ON AN AOKP VERSION when I get it on Friday. 🙂
If they had more stock on launch day, I would own one of these now, and I’d be a lot more pissed off than I was when they didn’t have enough stock. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
Samsung. Brilliant hardware, really hampered by woeful software.
There’s lag problems?
Samsung pushed this out too quickly for a reason. To take attention away from the HTC One. Update has already been pushed by AT&T. I’m sure it won’t be long for one to get pushed by the carriers in Australia.
I just use nova launcher, and switched off smart stay and smart scroll, its been more than a week and I haven’t had any lag.
Jesus, are you serious?
Rocking this HTC One, the thing is so smooth and responsive it almost feels like I need to catch up to the damn thing.
It’s really a testament to how ridiculously Samsung crap on a device with TouchWiz gimmickry that they can take a more powerful version of the same SoC and make it feel even vaguely laggy.
Feeling very happy with my choice right now.
(Who needs microSD when you have USB-OTG anyway? I’ll allow that the battery thing is a pain though…)
honestly, its pathetic to do all these when android has reached quad core…. touchwiz needs some serious optimisations right NOW!!!!
*shakes head*
Also disable all of the Cloud synching, and I prefer Omega ROMs rather than the risk of CyanogenMod.
What do u mean by risk of Cyanogenmod? Serious q.
I’ll assume he’s referring to non-stable builds.
Yes, good question. What risks? I’ve used CM for years and I’ve not had any problems beyond what have been disclosed in the changelog.
Well there was that thing not so long ago with CM logging your unlocking passwords and such (its been fixed but you dont know what else could be hidden in there)
I know a few people who refuse to use CM because of that… but it doesnt mean that the random rom that they use is any better.
But I think he was referring to that most AOSP roms being pretty unstable and unusable until they hit RC
Or you could just buy a HTC one…!
ahahahhaha love number 5 ..nicely done!!!!!!