As a Galaxy S10 user, I have been really happy with the phone, except for one thing — the damn thing has no notification LED. While I would find that annoying anyway, things are worse with the S10 because Samsung let go of such an amazing opportunity to make a ring light-up around the punch-hole camera to notify users of, well, notifications. Imagine how cool that would’ve been!
Alas, what Samsung didn’t give us, we now have, courtesy of Chainfire — yes, the developer behind some incredible apps for both rooted, and non-rooted devices. Chainfire has developed an app called ‘Holey Light’ (Free) which brings the notification LED to the Galaxy S10 in the best way possible — yup, a ring around the punch-hole camera.
It’s very easy to set-up, and there are a lot of controls over the notification light, per-app color settings, size, animation, etc.
Note: The Holey Light app requires a lot of permissions. If you’re not comfortable with that, you shouldn’t download the app because it won’t work without these permissions.
If you are okay with the permissions and you’ve downloaded the app, the rest is easy. The app guides you through the basic set up, after which you can adjust settings to suit your liking and needs.
For one, you can choose from a number of animations — Swirl is obviously the one that looks the best, but it’s also the one that will consume the most amount of battery (up to 5.5% per hour, according to Chainfire). Personally, I use the ‘Pie’ animation, since it just pops up on the punch-hole camera, and then stays that way, which is not only less of a distraction to me while I’m working, but it’s also less of a battery hog which is great.
Other that that, you can adjust the colors for various app notifications, and Holey Light even lets you set different colors for different notification channels being used by apps. However, the best part about Holey Light, is even if you’ve not set up colors for a particular app, it automatically assigns a suitable color to it, which is just great. Obviously, you can change these colours, or disable holey-light for a particular app, or notification channel completely if you want.
Holey Light is currently an unreleased beta, so there might be bugs. However, the developer is constantly working on fixes and patches, so you can rest assured that the bugs will be fixed.
So, if you were also looking for a great app that can add a notification LED to your Galaxy S10, download Holey Light (Free) from the Play Store. It’s great.
Abubakar Mohammed
