Is there any way I can fix these problems with Android Lollipop on my Samsung S4?

A

AC Question

I'd be very grateful if anyone could help me out with these problems I'm having with Lollipop.

1. The theme/design is awful - my phone went from sleek and professional-looking to one that looks more like it belongs to a 14-year-old girl. It is far too bright, the colours are garish and just... ugly. The app icons and everything in general now looks "flat" and cartoonish. I'm very disappointed with the look of this update - my phone now looks and is as user-unfriendly as an iPhone, when I deliberately chose this phone as I do not like iPhones. They've even changed the colour of the keyboard for some bizarre reason.

I've spent the last few days looking up guides and I've come across photos of phones running Lollipop with a greyish theme, which looks far more suitable to an adult male - but I cannot figure out how to get it. Can anyone offer any advice?

2. Phone is now slow and battery drains even faster than before. I've even turned my screen's brightness down substantially just to get a bit more battery life out of it - which I've never had to before. WhatsApp in particular is very slow and laggy - if there is more than one conversation going on at the same time, my phone has a seizure.

I read up about doing a "cache wipe" (or something to that effect), which I did - it improved things slightly, but it seems that it's slowing down again. Honestly, I don't want to have to keep wiping my phone every couple of days to keep it usable.

3. Notifications! Bloody notifications! Prior to the downgrade to Lollipop, I would keep my phone on the silent setting, with only the LED light as an indicator of notifications - with different colours for different things. It was perfect, now that function is gone too. If I put my phone on silent mode, there's no LED.

After looking up guides online, I've managed to tweak what seems like a thousand different settings to get a similar functionality to what I had before with just the press of a button. I'm still testing it out so I don't know if it will actually work or not.

4. "Message banners" - Now whenever I get a WhatsApp message (and I assume this will happen with other apps, I know it also happens with emails) I get a horrible, annoying, attention-seeking banner popping up at the top of my screen. It really, really, gets on my nerves. Previously, I'd just get a scroll of text along the top status bar, which was annoying but tolerable enough. These aren't the same ones that can be disabled from within the WhatsApp notifications settings menu. Please tell me there's a way to disable this new feature before it drives me crazy.

5. "Red circles" - I don't know the technical term for them, but now I get these annoying little red circles with "unread message" numbers in them all over the place. Pre-Lollipop, I'd only get them on the email app and occasionally on the Facebook one. This has also made the "group mute" function of WhatsApp completely useless as I still get these red circles appear over the WhatsApp icon. How can I get rid of them?

If anyone knows a way to rectify any of these problems, please let me know :)
 

itguyjax8430

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Welcome to Android Central!

As far as performance and battery I would say do a factory reset to solve that issue. Have you tried installing another launcher like Nova Launcher to change the looks?
 

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