I’m always on the look out for a cool new lockscreen, although I’m not really sure why because Android handles the lockscreen really well already. There are a few that are pretty exceptional, and Start for Android has the potential to be one of them.

The lockscreen on this app is really cool in a lot of ways. Unfortunatley, it kind of looks too much like it belongs on a Samsung device to suit my taste, and there isn’t anything you can really do about it on that end. The animations are really nice, though, and that’s one of the redeeming qualities, aesthetically.

So when you unlock the device you’ll have a few options. The most obvious change to the lockscreen is the sidebar that you’ll find. You can scroll through this and probably reminisce about old Samsung Windows Mobile devices, if you had phones back then. It’s basically a set of quick options that you can slide out to access. The missed events one is probably my favorite because it presents the events in a really nice format, and gives you some nifty options like call back or reply. The app pulled messages that were ancient when it first launched, though. Kind of weird.

Holding down the traditional lockscreen button will open up options for your camera, phone, messaging apps, favorites, or it will simply unlock it. Here is another feature I really like because if you slide it up to something like the messenger icon, colorful sub-icons will pop up for all of your apps relating to communication.

Now for the bad parts. The lockscreen is slow to pull up. If I turn my phone’s display off and turn it back on shortly after, it will usually take a few seconds for it to actually pop up. Meanwhile, I could have already begun using the phone how I intended to. This can be annoying. There are also no real security features because you honestly need to turn off your native lockscreen when using this app.

Start has some really cool ideas, but could use some work in a few areas. The performance needs to be bolstered so that it works every time, no exception. And the lack of security options will really turn off a lot of users. l