You have the Samsung Galaxy S6, the S6 edge or the S6 Active but you want the stock Android Lollipop experience. What do you do? Well, you have a few different options—you download the Google Now Launcher, you download the new Material Design theme found on the Theme Store, or you do both. Well, let’s first take a look at the brand new Material Design theme.
If you dive into the Theme Store on your Galaxy S6, you will now find this new Material Design theme which has been highly anticipated for some time now. It’s now here on the Theme Store under the new Themes this Week section or the Themes for Men section (which is kind of odd and kind of sexist). If you go ahead and download that theme and you apply it, several different changes happen. First of all, the home screen is set to one of Google’s stock wallpapers which you can change if you don’t like it but it is one of the stock wallpapers you can find on a stock Lollipop device. You have a Google folder on the right filled with all kinds of stock Google applications and there are some new icons as well like the app drawer icon which has also changed. The Messenger, Dialer icon and Camera icons are also changed.
If we take a look at the slide down notification tray, it too has changed and it actually appears a lot more flat and simple than it did before. It still resembles TouchWiz quite a bit but the color scheme has changed dramatically. The biggest aesthetic difference actually takes place in the settings drawer, where we’ll find all the stock settings icons which look a lot less childish than the icons found in the default TouchWiz theme. But you can really get a grasp of just how different the icons look if you go to the settings and click on edit quick settings on the top, you’ll find all those minimal greenish blues stock Android icons here. So if you’re a huge fan of stock Android Lollipop and you own the Galaxy S6, the S6 edge or the S6 Active, you should seriously consider downloading this theme (if you haven’t already).
But if you want to take an extra step to make your device even more like a device running stock Android, you can install and equip the Google Now Launcher. The Google Now Launcher will give you access to Google Now on the home screen so you can just swipe to the right and you’ll find Google Now. It will also present you with a larger more stock Android-esque app icons with that Material Design app drawer that you just can’t really find elsewhere.
But what’s really neat is that Material Design theme that you downloaded and installed from the Samsung Theme Store is still applied and is still running in the background even with the Google Play Launcher running. The notification panel and the settings drawer will carry all of those stock Android icons which is pretty neat.
So if you want your Galaxy S6 to look like a device running stock Android, my advice would be to not only apply the Material Design theme but to also apply the Google Now Launcher to convert as many areas of your device into Material Design.
Let me know what your thoughts are of this theme. Obviously, it’s not entirely like stock Android but it’s as close to stock Android as we can get on a TouchWiz device without ruining or installing a custom ROM. I personally really like it, especially paired with the Google Now Launcher.