[Samsung Galaxy Note 8 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, &] Max_Terrible:
Review

A small review on my experience of Android Pie, so far.

- Android 9 and OneUI looks really good and I like the overall feel of the UI. The ROM is good. It works perfectly and it's smooth and fast, to my experience, so far. I don't have any issues or problems, so far.

- The problems I have might be related to the Titanium backups I restored. Some apps didn't work or launch properly. I had to reinstall some of them.

- GoodLock doesn't work, at all. Thus far the only module I have that works, is the One Handed Operation+. Other modules, Samsung downright just disables, like Routines, which I also used. I can't even see it in the app manager. If I unfreeze it in Titanium Backup, Android just freezes it immediately again. I hope Samsung updates the GoodLock modules to work with their Pie update, in the future.

- The AoD seems to lack some previous features, or I just haven't found them, where before you could turn off certain apps from showing notifications on the AoD. You can't seem to do that anymore, so all my persistent apps just always shows on my AoD and it's a little annoying staring at notifications I know is permanently there. Makes it a little difficult to determine when I have new notifications at a quick glance.

- Some settings feels like they were maybe moved from where they were before, because I had to hunt down some of them and it took me a while to get everything setup again the way I want it.

- I also really dislike the new camera UI. It adds an extra step to record videos, which feels like we're going back to the Android 2 era, where we had different shortcuts for the camera and video recorder, until Samsung in all irony combined the two into one app and UI. Now they're also the ones going back to separate UIs for the two. Funny how the world works.

- The gestures is nice, but I guess I'm just too used to the navigation bar and the buttons and I just prefer the actual navigation bar. It's unfortunate Samsung removed the dot on the navbar to quickly hide it and restore it, if you want the extra space for certain apps. You can hide the navbar and have the gestures via a toggle in the quick toggles menu, but it's extra effort.

- Device Maintenance (Device Care) doesn't have an Edge Panel anymore, which doesn't really matter, but it was a nice quick way to get to the battery and RAM usage settings. Now it's a long trip through the settings, again.

- Also, on the Device Care note, I can't seem to find the settings to turn on or off battery optimisation for certain apps. I only got to it once when an app requested to turn off battery optimisation and took me there directly. I haven't managed to get to those settings again, myself. The overall battery management settings is also quite different and will take some getting used to, if you spend a bit of time properly and manually managing your apps. EDIT: I've found where you can change app battery optimisations. You go into Device Care, select battery, at the top, tap on Battery Usage, then tap on any app in the list and it'll bring up some statistics. There's a button that says "Optimise battery usage" and that'll take you to the list where you can turn on and off optimisations for apps.

- Unfortunately Xposed isn't available for Android Pie, yet (I'm not sure if it will be in the near future). I'm going to miss Xposed dearly. Anyway, upward and onward. We'll make due.

EDIT:

- Seems like Samsung also changed how the pop-up view works. You can't swipe in from a corner of an app to put it in pop-up view, anymore. There isn't a setting for this. Instead, you have to now go to recent apps and tap the app icon at the top of the card and select "open in pop-up view". Just another way Samsung is making some things more difficult to do, instead of easier, which I thought was the purpose of new OS updates and UI updates, especially the OneUI update.

- On a more positive note, I do like the larger buttons when you have to choose between different things, like when choosing what app to open something with, the "just once" or "always" buttons. Something else that's also really nice, when you take a screenshot, it gives you the option to scroll capture, so you don't need to SPen and select "screen write" to do that, anymore, and the buttons and and everything looks really nice, as well.

To no fault of the ROM itself, but it also feels a little weird not having all the extra Samsung crap that comes with the stock ROM, which I was on before. It feels a little like things are missing (which, I mean, technically they are, but it just feels weird). This isn't a problem, though, since it's part of the reason for installing custom ROMs and I'm sure it's also part of why it feels so smooth and fast. Like I said, it's not a problem, it's just because it's different from what I was used to over the last 6 months and need to get used to it again.

That's my personal feelings after using the ROM and the update for a few hours. Hopefully some of the annoyances will be fixed or changed in future updates.

TL;DR - Good update, good ROM. Like it overall, aside from the few small annoyances from Samsung's side.