6 secret Samsung apps every Galaxy owner should download right now

Samsung has a long history of serving power users with cutting-edge hardware and deep customization. The company also ships plenty of its own apps and services that add extra value to the experience. Some of those additions feel like bloat, but many are genuinely solid tools.

Many of the best ones are already baked into One UI, like Samsung Reminder. Others are niche apps that can make a real difference even if they aren’t aimed at everyday users. However, they’re also so hidden and unknown you may not even realize they exist.

With that in mind, here are a few hidden Samsung apps you might not have heard of, but should absolutely try.

One Hand Operation Plus

One Hand Operation Plus feels like more work than it’s worth at first glance, but that changes once you actually learn to use it. How often do you really need one-handed operation, and is it that big a deal? As it turns out, more than I thought.

Simply put, the app puts customizable handles along the edges of your screen, replacing long thumb stretches with simple swipes. What I like is that you can add several gesture handle sets and tune each one. You can also adjust the touch width range, which modifies how far the handles travel up and down on either side of the display. The advanced settings go further still with other features such as letting you pick apps where the handles won’t appear.

The app doesn’t hold your hand or explain much, but it isn’t hard to learn either. Once I set it up and got the hang of it, using my phone one-handed turned out to be far more useful than I expected. It had just been a pain until then.

Samsung Sound Assistant

I stumbled onto Samsung Sound Assistant a few months ago while trying to solve a small but real problem. My partner snores a little too loudly from time to time, so I sleep wearing noise-canceling headphones. At first, I used a rain app with a ton of customization options, but I eventually decided I wanted soft piano music in the background, along with game soundtracks like Chrono Trigger and Zelda. I could run both apps at once without any trouble; the problem was that the music drowned out the rain.

Enter Samsung Sound Assistant, which lets you set a custom volume level for every app. At night, I turn Spotify down to around 70% and leave the rain app at 100%. My rain app already plays over other audio, but Sound Assistant lets me run any two source apps at the same time.

Sound Assistant does more than juggle app volume. Its fine volume controls are far more granular than the defaults, and it adds volume-button shortcuts plus a few advanced options, such as the ability to tweak Bluetooth latency.

Samsung Flow

There are countless ways to sync your phone with your PC these days. Some are official solutions built into the operating system; others are standalone apps, like Samsung Flow. Samsung’s version technically requires two apps: one on Android, and one from the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 or higher.

Microsoft’s Phone Link already handles text messaging, app notifications, and full mobile app streaming. If that’s all you need, there’s no reason to switch to this tool. Still, Flow does a few things the built-in solution won’t, including full-screen mirroring and control. It also supports a direct wired connection, which is more stable.

The number one reason to use Samsung Flow, though, is that Phone Link caps file sizes more strictly. If you want to move files quickly and easily, Flow is one of the best ways to do it. You also get clipboard sharing and a handful of other extras.

Samsung Expert Raw

I use nearly every app on this list, but I have to admit that Expert Raw isn’t for me. It’s still worth recommending to the right person, though. This is a highly specialized camera app that blends multi-frame computational photography with pro controls to capture 16-bit DNG files.

For those who don’t know, a 16-bit DNG records deep color information and leans on tricks like multi-frame HDR stacking to pull detail out of dark shadows and blown highlights. The result is a file that’s much easier to tweak in post, whether you’re adjusting exposure, shadows, or color temperature.

If you want pro-level control, Expert Raw is worth a look. The Play Store offers more advanced camera apps, but many come with downsides, like ads or premium pricing. Expert Raw is the easier one to pick up and master.

Samsung Good Guardians

Samsung Good Guardians, formerly Galaxy Labs, is a utility suite built to optimize device performance. In other words, it does what a decade of gimmicky performance optimization apps have claimed to do, except this one actually delivers.

The Battery Tracker and Battery Guardian system gives you an hour-by-hour breakdown of battery consumption. This actually came in handy recently for me as I was trying to work out why my battery life had suddenly gone to heck; it turned out an app was misbehaving and causing extra drain.

Battery tracking is my main reason for recommending Good Guardians, but a few other features earn their keep. Galaxy App Booster speeds up app launches and makes targeted tweaks to improve performance, while Thermal Guardian monitors device temperatures and tracks daily CPU usage for troubleshooting. The suite does more than that, but the rest is fairly minor by comparison.

Samsung Home Up

Several of Samsung’s best apps started life on the Good Lock customization platform, and most of them now exist as standalone apps, including Sound Assistant and One Hand Operation Plus. Home Up is also worth looking at, but it doesn’t have a standalone version, so you’ll need to install Good Lock first from Google Play or the Galaxy Store to use it.

You’ll find the Home Up module within the main screen of the Good Lock app. This tool is an absolute dream for anyone who wants deep control over the One UI home screen, the recent apps layout, and more.

You can touch many parts of the UI that you wouldn’t be able to out of the box. For example, Home Up lets you add blur effects and custom background colors to the app dock. You can also assign dozens of shortcuts to custom two- to five-finger gestures, remove grid restrictions, scale individual widgets, and customize the edge panel.

If you were hoping for even deeper customization than Samsung’s built-in theming tools offer, Home Up is a great way to take your Galaxy experience to the next level.