I don't know why all OEMs have fallen in line with the visual tragedy that is the bouncy elastic overscroll effect.
In a off-site discussion about how OEMs are lacking customization, someone pointed me to the good work of Good Lock for Samsung. I was very intrigued! But after much research, it seems the most important feature the app could ever offer is missing! And that about 3 years ago as I read these forums, it was tested in OneUI to not keep the stretch effect in beta 3 or beta 4, but community feedback prompted Samsung to just stick with AOSP's copying of iOS where if you scroll to the end of a boundary, the whole screen should distort and warp and then spring back to normal. This is a great feature if you are thinking of your phone as a toy and need that hit of dopamine between tiktok videos, but for me, it triggers motion sickness. I have read many comments made over the last few years since Android 12 introduced this and it is very controversial - some people like it, some people dislike it.
As I look to purchase a new phone, Samsung would have won me over if they fixed this one thing with the UI and power of Good Lock. I'd have bought it without hesitation if I could disable just the overscroll behavior, but even better if I could have the old glow effect. But GL, despite being super awesome in customizing important and unimportant stuff, misses the mark on making a smartphone a daily use device by not correcting Google's obvious error in mimicking Apple.
Note that I have only discerened Samsung has stuck to the bouncy effect from watching demo of Good Lock on a Fold6 (2024) youtube video and seeing their icons bounce around as they got to end of the scroll window, and that the demo never covered the ability to change that behavior.
Note that while a UI improvement on this is appreciated, it needs to be something that effects all apps. Supposedly youtube comments will bounce around as you wait for more to load. I have purposefully not upgraded my OS to avoid this nauseating effect so I can only repeat concerns I have found on the web.
Yes, disabling animations throughout the OS is a hammer solution when we all want a scalpel. But that is my current plan with whatever next phone I get.
Why would I post this in the Samsung forums? Because Good Lock seems to be the best chance of any company disabling overscroll or restoring tolerable overscroll visual effects. I gained a lot of respect for the premium price Samsung charges for their phones with the extensive software support allowing for users to customize their phone as I researched Good Lock.
If ever Samsung adds overscroll toggles to Good Lock or OneUI, I'd like to be notified! If this comes up in a google search in the future and you can break the news that Samsung finally added that feature, I am subscribed to email updates!
I dont think there's an option because no ones ever really complained about it. Although I appreciate your distain for excessive animation (lord knows samsung fans can be obsessed with animations), the overscroll effect predates the iPhone and has been part of mobile interfaces since the symbian days, as it's meant to be a simple visual indicator of where the page ends on a display that may be too small for traditional scroll indications. It's one of those things that's so old and normalized, no one really thought about it. If you leave a review on the store listing for goodlock and the various modules (i think registar is probably the one most likely to consider such a feature), you'll be communicating directly to the goodlock team and have the best chance of getting the feature implemented.
Thanks for the direction! I'll see about getting feedback there and I may as well compile the various places I found users asking for a solution on fixing/disabling elastic (reddits, xdas, stackoverflow or superusers, etc.). I agree overscroll has been around since before phones. But on Android, it was changed from a simple bubble or "GLOW" per what I found in official documentation - a semi-opaque slice of a circle would erupt from the edge of the window or element being scrolled where it had hit the end and disappear when the user let go of the screen - to the bouncy effect in Android 12. There could be a billion different ways to indicate a user has reached the end of an element or window, such as violently shaking the screen, displaying a big warning box, sounding a panic alarm, inverting the screen colors, highlighting the edge of the element whose bounds have been reached, nothing, powering off the phone, turning on the flashlight, taking a selfie, redirecting to a new web page, billing a credit card via google play or samsung store, or maybe something less drastic.
History in iOS I'm not sure as I always felt iOS is too simple yet unintuitive, but it predates Android's adoption of the bouncy overscroll from what I could research because of people who use both iOS had been so happy Android was copying them for this effect.
Again, thanks for direction and a tip that different modules of Good Lock sound like they have different dev teams.
