Missing apps

It seems to be (another) samsung problem if you've been tinkering. Go to Settings, under Device click Home screen mode. Select Easy mode then click 'Apply' and it should resolve it. If you're rooted and been trying different transition/animation scales then put them back to 1, if you aren't/didn't then no worries. That should work.

No, you'd know if you were rooted. It gains access to the root file system so don't worry about that. Have you tried going into settings/apps/launcher(or whatever the touchwiz launcher is called) and clearing the data? It should work too as it'll return to default settings and appearance. Try that with gallery too, settings/apps/gallery/clear data. Neither option will erase anything on your sd, just return the apps back to default.

you could back up to a cloud service like dropbox or copy, and helium can back up your apps without root. if you clear the gallery data you won't lose any pictures on the SD card, and clearing the launcher data just sets the launcher to default, nothing else. I'm not familiar with Samsung devices so this is just advice garnered from previous experience. without root it's hard to do serious damage to the phone so anything should be fixable, unless it's a touchwiz issue.

— modified on Jan 3, 2014, 9:07:23 AM

Hi @Claudia, the sharing issue in the Gallery is a known issue with the stability patch for Android 4.3. As far as I'm aware a new patch hasn't been issued to reolve it yet. You're not also getting phantom download notifications too? That was the other big problem with the patch. (If that happens just clear the Downloads cache in the All Apps tab in the App Manager).

The Gallery issue has been fixed a lot so far with the following method: just turn Paper Artist app back on. Go into Settings > More > Application manager and scroll to the Turned Off tab. then just turn Paper Artist back on and that should resolve the force close issue. I'm not too familiar with the TouchWiz popup, but if clearing the cache doesn't work you could turn your phone off and pull the battery for a minute or so, then reboot. If this still doesn't fix the issue you might need to do a backup (use Helium, as @Sinskter suggested) and perform a factory reset - this process usually clears up any issues following an update. I'm not sure what Samsung you have, but check the forum for the factory reset tutorial.