The homescreen on an android device is one of the best parts about the Android device. It gives the user almost limitless customization and personalization options from icon packs, to widgets, wallpapers, and plenty more. This customization gets amplified tenfold when you have third party home launchers installed that give you even more customization options than any stock launcher. One amazing feature of at least a couple of different third party home launchers is the backup feature, which allows you to do just as the feature is so named, backup your homescreen.
Why do this? So you can easily migrate that homescreen set up back to where it belongs should you either be wiping your device and want things back the way they were prior to the wipe, or if you’re switching devices you can simply install your chosen launcher and hit the restore option. Simple as that, provided you have any other elements installed on your device that were backed up initially, like icon packs or specific widgets. Samsung seems to be really fond of this action and seems to have patented the idea of being able to migrate your homescreen to another device. While there are no hard details on how Samsung plans to implement this or when, we’ll likely see this feature in future flagship devices like the Galaxy S series and the Galaxy Note series. If it’s popular enough they may even have it go mainstream to the majority of their future lineups after a launch. This is just a patent for now though so there’s no telling where the feature will end up.
According to the patents, Samsung will hold the backup file of people’s saved homescreen orientations and store them in the cloud. This will allow users to essentially transfer the setup from device to device regardless of where both of them are. So, basically exactly like the way other popular third party launchers store your homescreen backup already. While it’s great to see OEM’s like Samsung taking inspiration from developers who have already made this wonderful feature available, hopefully this won’t hurt any of the applications who already have this sort of feature in place, as this one thing that makes them so popular with users.
