Help Android 8 to Android 12 migration headaches

[Needleroozer]

I just bought a Galaxy A52, and almost immediately it upgraded to Android 12. My previous phone was Android 8, so there are a lot of changes and I'm not sure which version introduced them, but I don't like them. They're downright annoying. Specifically:

I don't want to use the native calendar, I use Google Calendar, but I can't turn the native calendar off. I tried to turn off notifications, but EVERY time I make a change in Google Calendar the native calendar gives me a message "Calendar noti. not shown" Yeah, that's what I want. Why is it showing me a notification that I've turned notifications off? It's stupid and annoying and wasn't in Android 8. This may be a Samsung thing.

Notifications in general. When an app has a message for me, a little number shows up on the icon to tell me how many unread messages I have. Super. Just like Android 8. But I also get a notification for EACH MESSAGE. This is new and I hate it. I tried to turn it off but that turns off all notifications for the app, including the number on the icon, which I like.

The Gallery has changed. It used to only show the pictures I take with my camera, now it shows every image and video, including the ones I download. When I show someone my photos I don't want to also show them the political memes I downloaded. No apparent way to turn this off.

After the upgraded to Android 12 I have a message that the software upgrade was successful. I cannot clear this message, I can only delay it for my choice of time up to one hour, then it comes back.

To me these are steps backward. As I discovered with Google Calendar, loading a substitute app doesn't help. Is there a fix I'm missing or is this just the way Android 12 works and I'm stuck with it?

 

[ocnbrze]

its not completely android 12. sammsung likes to add their crap on top of it......which version of One UI do you have?

i hate One UI. try a different launcher. i use Nova Prime. it is way better and has a ton of cool customizations. you can try the free version which gives you very basic stuff or you can get Prime and unlock so much more.

as for your calendar......just turn off alerts for it......and just so you know, the native calendar app is from Samsung and not Google.

notifications is what it is. i just pulled down the notification bar and clear them.......and both gallery and google photo's do this which i am just used to i guess.

"the software upgrade was successful" .....does it pop up randomly? and it gives you a choice to delay it? that seems odd. have you tried re-booting the phone?

and lastly i would not blame this solely on android 12. One UI is samsung's attempt to make android 12 more unique to only their phones so sometimes the mix gets all tangled up.

 

[Davdi]

It's mainly Samsung's 'improvements'. I have a Nokia X20 with vanilla Android 12 and don't see any of your problems. as @ocnbrze says, try Nova Launcher or Lawnchair, which I like..

 

[Hadron]

The problem with changes or sillinesses is that it's hard to know what is Android, what is the manufacturer (especially if that manufacturer is Samsung) and what is your carrier (if you bought the phone through them it's likely they have messed with things as well).

I have a Galaxy s21 running Android 12, One UI 4. Like the others I don't use Samsung's launcher (I also use Nova Prime).

It's rather annoying that Samsung won't let me disable or uninstall their Calendar app, because it's not very good. But I simply turn off its notifications and it doesn't bother me - I also don't get any messages about it not showing notifications. They did not make it easy though: looking at my settings it looks like I went into "app notifications", found Samsung's Calendar, then went into "Notification categories" and turned off all of the categories I could (it won't let you turn off "ringtone notifications", whatever those are, but I don't seem to get any of those anyway).

As for the notifications badges problem I'm afraid this may be Google's fault. For a long time Google had no native system for showing notification badges, but some time around 2017-18 they introduced one. Unfortunately it was pretty brain-dead, and relies on notifications appearing in your notification slide - so if for example you swipe them away the notification badge will disappear too. I understand that Samsung had a better system of their own previously, but they chose to use Google's new and inferior one - I remember complaints here at the time, and it was clear that the new, inferior behaviour was exactly the same as what Google had just introduced. There is nothing you can do about that. Nova launcher used to have an add-on that did this properly (TeslaUnread), but they discontinued support for that (maybe the changes Google were making made this harder to maintain? I don't know) and the current versions of Nova no longer support it, so that workaround is no longer available. I'm afraid that unless Google learn to care about the function (which hasn't happened in the last few years) we're stuck with this second-rate version. At least A12's grouping of notifications means that they don't take up as much space if you leave them.

I don't know about the Samsung Gallery changes as I've only had a Samsung since December. My previous phones all had Gallery apps that would show all images in all folders, and that's always been the norm with Android. Your best bet is probably to try a few third party Gallery apps and find one that does what you want. But a workaround with the Samsung app is to go into the "albums" view and select "camera": that will just show the shots you have taken as opposed to downloads etc - again, this is something you can do with any Gallery app.

I've no idea about the "update is successful" message. It sounds pointless (you've done the update, so why do you need to be reminded that you've done it) and I've never heard of anything like that before: normally messages that can only be paused are reminders that there is an update still to apply. It goes without saying that I have no such message myself (I updated my s21 to A12 immediately, so if this was a general feature it should happen to me too). Have you tried restarting the device?

 

[Needleroozer]

I don't know about the Samsung Gallery changes as I've only had a Samsung since December. My previous phones all had Gallery apps that would show all images in all folders, and that's always been the norm with Android. Your best bet is probably to try a few third party Gallery apps and find one that does what you want. But a workaround with the Samsung app is to go into the "albums" view and select "camera": that will just show the shots you have taken as opposed to downloads etc - again, this is something you can do with any Gallery app.

I've had several android phones, and the Gallery always only showed photos taken with the phone's camera. My last phone, for example, was a ZTE Axon7 with Android 8 and it only showed photos I took, not images I downloaded. Switching to Album view loses the separation by date taken, which I like. I guess it's better than nothing, but what I really want is the Gallery app I had on my Axon7. I've seen articles about how to "hide" directories from the Gallery app, but I shouldn't have to hide EVERY directory except DCIM, and hunt for new directories to hide every time a new app comes along. There should be a way to hide every directory EXCEPT DCIM. This is frustrating.

 

[Hadron]

For the Samsung Gallery app, when in the folder view click the little 3 dot menu and select "sort". One of the options there is "group by date". Turn that on and you should get the view you want.

You can set similar things in 3rd party apps. Some do let you actually limit the app to only showing images from a particular folder, e.g. F-Stop can do that. Its default is to scan the whole device for images (like every Android Gallery app I've ever used), but you can turn off that default and specify which folder(s) to scan. Then if you set the grouping (which is again via the sorting options, though they have a dedicated icon in this app) to group by day then you have what you were after: a gallery app that only shows your photos, nothing else, with the photos grouped by day.

 

[Needleroozer]

F-Stop is great, thanks! Basically behaves like my old Gallery.