We're just about halfway through 2017, and the Samsung Galaxy S8 still remains as one of the most attractive smartphones that money can buy. The S8's Infinity Display truly is something to behold, but while Samsung may have knocked it out of the park with the S8's screen, the company's latest flagship still suffers from something that Samsung has struggled with for years - software lag and stutters.

Samsung completely overhauled the look of TouchWiz with the S8 and S8+, and while this custom take on Android is cleaner than it's ever been before, it still suffers from stutters and framedrops when navigating through the UI.

One area where all of this is most noticeable is when swiping up to access the app drawer and then swiping back to the main home screen. Thankfully, according to the changelog for the most recent version of the Samsung TouchWiz Home launcher in the Play Store (6.1.09.2), Samsung has finally corrected this issue.

In addition to a new "information screen" and better readability for app names that show under their respective icons, the latest update to the TouchWiz launcher also, "Fixed the lag issue when swiping up and down to switch between the home and apps screens."

While we do have to give Samsung credit for addressing and correcting some lag, hopefully this is somewhat of a wakeup call for the company that their bloated skin on top of Android is doing more harm than good. The Galaxy S8/S8+ are some of the most powerful Android devices on the market with a Snapdragon 835 processor and 4GB of RAM, and while this processing tech is more than capable of powering through Android without a hitch, Samsung's TouchWiz still manages to cripple the end user experience.

Reviews on the Play Store as mostly positive for the new update to TouchWiz Home in regards to the fixing of the lag issue, so hopefully you'll now notice that your S8 working the way it should have been when it was first released.


Google Play