One UI 9 does not reinvent the Galaxy interface, but it hands owners far more control over how their phone looks and behaves. The customization story lands in three places: Home Up, the module inside Samsung’s Good Lock suite; multi-finger gestures; and a Quick Panel that can now be reshaped almost without restriction. Flashier additions such as My Fancam, which casts you as the protagonist of your own videos, have grabbed the headlines, but the tweaks you will actually touch every day are these interface controls.
- Good Lock is the gateway: Home Up unlocks Favorites Background and matching options for the Edge Panel, giving users blur, shadow, image and colour controls over core home-screen areas.
- Gestures scale up: One UI 9 supports two-, three-, four- and five-finger swipes and pinches, each mappable to a specific action such as a screenshot or a volume bump.
- The Quick Panel loses its limits: elements can be dragged, resized freely or deleted, and a Together setting merges separate panels into a single unified shade.
Home Up and Good Lock: where the new control lives
Unlocking the deeper customization requires Samsung’s official Good Lock suite plus its companion Home Up app. Samsung has poured a substantial amount of work into this corner of the software, and much of the new personalization hangs off it. The standout tool is Favorites Background, switched on inside Home Up’s home-screen section. Open it and you can layer on blur and shadow effects, swap the image and colour, and completely redesign the backdrop of your favourites area.
A comparable set of options exists for the Edge Panel: jump into Home Up, tap “Edge Panel” and the equivalent adjustments are waiting. None of this is the kind of update you notice the moment you unlock the device, but it is exactly the kind that makes a phone feel like yours.
Multi-finger gestures and a Quick Panel without size caps
Gestures are configured from the gesture settings menu, and version 9 widens them considerably. Swipes or pinches performed with a set number of fingers can be bound to specific actions — a two-finger downward swipe for a screenshot or a volume increase, for instance. Combinations exist for two, three, four and five fingers, each with its own catalogue of motions and actions, and users have been experimenting with them since the One UI 9 betas arrived.
A practical word of caution: start with a single gesture, the one you repeat most, rather than configuring five at once. A gesture you cannot remember is worse than a button. One well-chosen multi-finger shortcut, a screenshot trigger being the obvious candidate, saves more taps than any other setting.
The Quick Panel is edited by tapping the edit icon inside the panel itself. From there, any element can be dragged to a new position, stretched by its right corner to change size, or removed. Regret a deletion and Add a control brings the button back wherever you want it. Samsung has also scrapped the previous size ceilings, so every item can be resized as far as you like. One extra tweak saves another swipe: inside the edit menu, Panel settings > Together collapses separate panels into a single unified shade, the most comfortable shortcut for anyone who wants notifications and controls on one screen.
Rollout, the AI split and the hardware around it
Deployment begins with the Galaxy S26 series before reaching other compatible models progressively. There is one significant cut-off: the Galaxy S23 and earlier will not receive the four most advanced AI features. Those include Now Nudge, which surfaces context-aware suggestions; Call Brief, which presents data in cards during a call; the Creative Studio; and Security Brief.
The reassuring part for older hardware is that the customization covered here does not depend on that AI layer — Home Up, gestures and the Quick Panel are interface-level settings. Even so, checking the official compatibility list for your exact model is the only way to be certain before assuming everything arrives.
Samsung has also unveiled hardware that fits neatly alongside the software: the Galaxy Tab S12+ and S12 Ultra, which the manufacturer calls the thinnest tablets on the Android market, and the SmartTag 3, compatible with iOS for the first time at $29, roughly €25 at October 2026 indicative rates. The strategy is familiar: deep personalization on the phone, refreshed accessories around it.
Where to start with five minutes to spare
Begin with the Quick Panel, because it is what you open most often during the day. Enter edit mode, move the three controls you rely on to the top, enlarge the brightness or connectivity toggle you touch constantly, and delete the ones you never press. Then install Good Lock and open Home Up to experiment with the Favorites Background. Leave four- and five-finger gestures for last: they are the hardest to remember and the easiest route to accidental taps.
The order matters for a simple reason. Every setting can be undone, but none of them teaches itself. If a change has gone unused after a week, revert it. That is the cheapest way to work out which customization genuinely earns its place and which was first-day enthusiasm.
The verdict
Three adjustments are worth making, and the rest can wait. In practice most people abandon personalization within a week — plenty configured, little used. The reasonable exceptions are one multi-finger gesture tied to your most repeated action, a Quick Panel ordered around your real usage, and a Favorites Background that lets you find your apps without thinking. On balance, One UI 9 earns a strong pass: customization is the most honest part of the release precisely because it does not hinge on AI that only runs on the most expensive models. What Samsung should communicate far better is which of these settings reach which devices. Until that clarity arrives, the compatibility list is worth more than any launch headline.