[Galaxy A3, A5, A7, A8, A9 General] XperiaNoobie:
Hello guys in this guide I will show you how to make your Galaxy A7 look a lot better and to be more responsive. This guide will work for both firmware versions (KitKat 4.4.4 , Lollipop 5.0.2) and it's aimed towards all kind of users be a newbie or power user. Up to this date we have not seen any development of custom ROMs for the A7 as well as its little brothers A5 and A3 so the annoying Touchwiz is all we have for now. To be honest I owned the phone for about a month and the lack of customization is driving me cray-cray , so I thought I should better find a temporary solution to get rid of that ****** preloaded Samsung ROM.

In this guide I will be covering some stuff that are not quite difficult to do and are guaranteed to give your phone a new more premium feel.

So let's get started shall we?​

1)Disabling S-Voice

First off , we have to make our phone a lot more responsive to our actions be pressing the back button or just going back to home. Samsung has equipped our phones with the S-Voice; an application aimed to rival Siri,Cortana and Google Voice, although it's somewhat good it makes our phone a bit slower when pressing the Home button and that is because when you double tap the home button S-Voice activates so we need to disable that second that our system waits for our second tap. To do so :

i)Open up your Apps drawer

ii)Find S-Voice and Open it

iii)On the upper right corner of your screen you will see 3 vertical dots, Tap on them and then press the settings tab.

iv)The 4th option should be Open via the home key and should be activated, So just click on it to deactivate it.

Simple as that!

2)Reducing the animation speeds

So this one is a bit tricky but nothing to worry. By reducing the animations you get a faster more responsive feeling.

So to do that you have to activate Developer Options on your settings. It's pretty easy!

i) Go to your settings.

ii)Navigate to the About Device tab and click on it.

iii)Find the Build Number tab. Then rapidly press for about 10-15 times. A message should come up saying that you have activated the Developer Options.

iv)Go back to your settings and now navigate to Developer Options and click on it

v)Scroll down until you find these 3 tabs: Window animation scale/Transition animation scale/Animator duration scale. All of the above should

vi)Click on each of them and set them to 0.5x

That's it you are done. Up untill now your phone should feel a lot more responsive and kinda faster

3)Time to download some Apps/Launchers

For launcher I suggest blindly the Nova Launcher and that is what I will cover in this guide so let's get to downloading and setting it up.

i) Download Nova Launcher from the Google Play [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoilsw.launcher&hl=en] and Install it.

ii)Now go to settings and then navigate to Default applications, Open it and Click on the Home tab and select the Nova Launcher option. Then finally press the Home button

So now let's set it up

i) Long press on the Desktop and then select settings

ii)Now Select Desktop

Icon layout -> Icon size 100%, Label -> On , Font -> Condensed , Shadow-Single line ->On

Persistent search bar -> Lollipop

Scroll effect -> Simple

Add icon to Home screen -> Off

iii) App & widget drawers

Scroll effect ->Simple

Infinite scroll -> Off

iv)Dock

Dock icons -> 5

Icon layout -> Icon size 100%, Label -> On , Font -> Condensed , Shadow-Single line ->On

v)Folders

Folder preview -> Grid

Folder background -> Circle(gray icon)

Transition animation -> Zoom

Icon layout -> Icon size 100%, Label -> On , Font -> Condensed , Shadow-Single line ->On, Color -> Black

vi)Look & Feel

Icon theme -> Lollipop

Scroll speed -> Nova

Animation speed -> Fast

So this is it guys, a simple not that hard guide to make your Samsung feel really close to Stock Lollipop. Unfortunately thing like the settings page can't be changed, at least without root. I'm thinking of making a guide for rooted users . It will depend on how this guide will do :D

Credits:

Teslacoil Software

phonebuff(inspired by these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC6mw8oH_HQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RE8cNisslI )​

Enjoy! And if you have any questions I will gladly help you. Don't forget to press the thank you button if you feel like I helped you :D. Cheers!