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I have a Samsung Note II. It used to be Android 4.2, and on the lockscreen, if I got a notification of an SMS, I could drag on that notification itself to unlock the phone and go straight to the SMS app.

Then 4.3 got rolled out and my phone updated itself. Now the lockscreen is a fancy multi-page customisable thing. But it's lost access to the key feature of letting me unlock and go straight to the source of a notification with one swipe.

Before (4.2):

  • Drag on the SMS notification -> Phone unlocks and goes straight to the SMS app.
  • Drag on the missed call notification -> Phone unlocks and goes straight to the phone call history.

Now (4.3):

  • Drag left or right on the SMS notification -> Lockscreen tries to switch to another page
  • Drag downwards on the SMS notification -> Lockscreen expands the empty space around the SMS notification to be a bigger empty space (?!)
  • To go to the SMS app, I have to (1) drag in the small "unlock phone" space, then (2) drag down my notifications bar from whatever app I end up in, and finally (3) tap the SMS notification.
  • I can't find any action that will simultaneously unlock the phone and take me straight to the SMS, or unlock the phone and take me straight to the phone call history (the source app of the notifications that are being displayed).

I guess I could install a custom lockscreen app like Celltick Start linked from question 49935. But it'd be nice if the smooth, easy functionality in the 4.2 lockscreen could still be available in 4.3 without using a custom app. Is there any way to do this?

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  • Your method for the 4.3 lock screen is unnecessarily long. Just tap the lock screen notification, and then drag in the highlighted box to unlock.
    – Dan Hulme
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 18:04
  • Hm, hadn't discovered that. I thought the lockscreen was meant to ignore taps. Fair enough. It's still 2 taps when it used to be 1 before though.
    – AlexC
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 0:06

1 Answer 1

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The answer is indeed as Dan Hulme mentioned:

  • Tap once on the notification (SMS, phone etc). This makes that notification shrink and fade, when in fact it's selecting it; extremely unintuitive but that's the way they implemented it...
  • This makes an empty grey box appear in the bottom half of the screen with no label. What you need to do now is drag across this box. Again, no label, no instructions, no suggestion, bad UI; but it does what you want: unlock the screen and go to the app corresponding to the notification (SMS, phone, etc).

Thanks Dan for the answer.

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