Just wanted to share my current setup on my phone. I'm using a custom launcher with the default icon pack, and I've spent a good amount of time getting everything just right. It feels really streamlined and personalized now. I love how clean and organized it looks. It's amazing what a little customization can do!
Launcher: sqTile Launcher available in Play Store
I have been writing software commercially for over ten years, always on somebody else's product. sqTile is the first thing that is mine. I kept trying launchers and kept bouncing off them after a few days, so at some point I stopped looking and wrote the one that fits how I actually use a phone. It is my daily driver now, and I am hoping it turns out to fit more people than just me.
It is a square tile home screen in the spirit of Windows Phone: tiles in seven sizes on a half cell grid, a dashboard page with calendar, weather, todos, reminders and a habit tracker, an app list you can pin anything from, and the turnstile animation the video ends on.
It was built around performance from the first commit rather than as a pass at the end. Baseline Profile shipped in the APK, R8 full mode, and every tile is an isolated composable, so a clock tick never recomposes anything but itself. Cold start is under 200 ms on my S25 Ultra. The dependency list is deliberately short: outside AndroidX and Google there is OkHttp and Gson and nothing else. No dependency injection framework, no image loading library, no HTTP wrapper. If I can write it in a hundred lines I would rather own those hundred lines.
Privacy, with the specifics rather than the slogan. There is no analytics SDK in the app at all. It never asks for location: the weather tile works by typing a city name, and there is no location permission in the manifest to begin with. It does not request the full package list either, so icon packs are found through the standard theme intents instead. Permissions are asked for one at a time, when you first use the feature that needs them, never in a wall on first launch. The one thing that does phone home is Firebase Crashlytics for crash reports, and I would rather say that here than have somebody find it.
I am working on it continuously and there is a subreddit at where I post release notes and collect feedback and feature requests. A good number of the things in this build came from people, so if something annoys you, that is the place it gets fixed.
Free on Play. There is a one time Pro unlock for the extras, no subscription and no ads, and picking an icon pack does not need it.
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.gradomski.sqtilelauncher
Happy to answer any questions about the build process - it's all Kotlin and Compose, single Activity, no Views. Honest feedback is highly appreciated!
If you're interested in checking it out, I'm giving away 10 promo codes. All I ask is that you share a screenshot of your setup on the subreddit. I really want to see how far you can push these tiles!
Been carrying a Windows Phone-shaped hole since Microsoft pulled the plug. Nothing on Android felt right: launchers either fake the look with static widgets or bury you in settings.
So I built sqTile. Real live tiles that update in place (clock, weather, next calendar event, today's habits, a photo tile with a slow pan), the resize-and-arrange grid you remember, and the turnstile flip when you tap in. Under 3MB right now, no ads, core is free.
It is in closed beta, going public on Google Play in a few days. Not selling anything today, I just wanted to show the people who would actually get why this matters. What did you miss most from WP that you would want back in a launcher? Be precise and remember about Android limitations 😄
