Nova launcher sped up my phone?

[alpha2k]

Phone is a samsung s3 on boost mobile. I'm not rooted and am on the latest kitkat version.
I recently have been having issues with laggyness and some slight split second freezing with stuff be it settings or apps, just in general NOT what this phone is spose to be or can be.
So recently I decided to factory reset the phone. After the reset with no apps except the base stuff the phone again seemed to go back to the same state it was before I reset and this was just after a recent reset to.
I hadn't used nova launcher in some time now because it had some weird issues I didn't like. So I decided to install it and give it a try again and to my very pleasant surprise things look like they got reworked and it's better now than I've ever seen it before. I decided to disable (not get rid of) the touchwiz launcher. So now all I am using is nova launcher and it's like my phone came back to life again..... everything is SO freeking snappy and fast it's like a new phone again.
I also noticed it seems my battery life had also improved a very noticeable amount to, it doesn't seem to drain near as much now. Not like a drastic improvement but definitely a noticeable improvement.


So all that said is it possible that me disabling touchwiz and using nova launcher that it could actually speed things up that much and improve battery life, or is it more a placebo affect?

 

[lunatic59]

So all that said is it possible that me disabling touchwiz and using nova launcher that it could actually speed things up that much and improve battery life, or is it more a placebo affect?

It most certainly is possible. TouchWiz ... pardon my bluntness ... is a pig. While a lot of people really like the feature set of TouchWiz and all the built in interfunctionality, it can put a real hit on performance. Personally I like Apex Launcher over Nova, but hey, that's we we all don't have iPhones.

You will never totally disable TouchWiz as it's cooked into the stock OS and trying to remove it will break stuff or soft-brick it. Still, it's nice to turn a Ford pickup into a Porsche once in a while.

 

[Stuntman]

I also use a GS3 running Nova Prime launcher. I personally have not notice an improvement in performance with Nova Prime over TW launcher. It's been two years since I started using NP and I only had my phone for a couple of months when I switched. I don't recall any performance issues at the time.

I do use a lot of the NP feature such as removing the dock, adding more home screen rows and overlapping widgets. The launcher is quite smooth. Apps may feel a little slow, but I've had my phone for over 2 years now. I think the longer you have a phone, the slower it feels because you see faster phones around you. I did fire up my old HTC Desire Z which I unlocked for use out of the country and that phone felt a lot slower than I remembered when I last used it over 2 years ago.

There are still some TW features that the launcher does not replace. The power controls and voice actions are still part of TW. The launcher only replaces the home screen.

 

[chanchan05]

It's more likely because of the reset. Plus, TouchWiz settings are set to glorify animations by default (kinda like the iPhone), which makes it APPEAR slower than it should be. HTC last I checked only had a 0.5 animation time, whereas TouchWiz has it on 1.0 by default. You can change it in the settings. Nova on the other hand has a default setting of even faster than 0.5 (which is also Google default speed I think).