Unable to tap and hold on home screen

[Taetae78]

My dad has the Samsung A54 5G. It was working perfectly until a software update was installed on April 16th. He said it was a UI update. It caused all the app notifications to be blocked and he had to manually go to each app to allow permissions. The one thing I haven't been able to fix for him his changing the standard home screen icons back to default. We're unable to "tap and hold" on the home screen to bring up the widgets and themes. We tried going to themes in settings to change the icons back to default but it didn't work. Please help!

[realaud · Accepted solution]

You can try the SOP of rebooting the phone into maintenance mode and clearing the cache partition and see if that helps. You might want to check if the last backup was before or after the update and then restore the backup - sometimes that clears things up. Sometimes even restoring the backup even after the update does not restore whatever messed up the phone in the first place.  First try clearing the cache and work from there.

PS: I've never seen a screen like that - is that "easy mode"?  I understand easy mode has protection against accidental touches, so you might have to press longer on the screen to bring up the widgets. If it is, take it off easy mode and then see if you can change the icons back.   If you can, then you can switch back to easy mode.

[Iamchaos13]

That's definitely not easy mode. Never seen icons like that unless they were downloaded. Weird.

[Taetae78]

Nope, he didn't download it. This was how his home screen was after the update. My software update was installed this morning and I didn't experience any issues

[Iamchaos13]

Dang.

[Taetae78]

It was an "Easy Homescreen" app that launched after the update. It was downloaded through device manager. We were able to uninstall it. Right before uninstalling, it made him select either Easy Homescreen or One UI. That fixed it!

[Taetae78]

Thanks so much... I'll try to walk my dad through the steps of clearing the cache and check to see if it's in easy mode. He lives over an hour away so we were on a Google Meet call.

[LongHiker]

Wondering if he installed a different launcher.

[Taetae78]

No launcher installed.. he received the software update notice and let it install.

[LongHiker]

He had to have done something else. There are none of the usual icons along the bottom of the screen just above the navigation buttons. The icons on the screen are not any icons present in any official Samsung release. And the 4 icons grouped together are not something that you can do in the stock launcher.