My Android Homescreens
Every now and then, a thread fills up with pages and pages of homescreens, from iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The common theme is a mix of widgets, icons, and general clutter. Mine is a little different.
Launcher #
This is Android 5.0, using the Google Now launcher. On the far left screen is Google Now, which is quite useless to screenshot, but does contain the vast majority of passive information that widgets used to give me: the weather, package shipments, news articles, etc. In the remaining two homescreens, I manage everything else. I could remove the app drawer entirely, and I wouldn’t miss a beat.
Primary Screen #
This is my main homescreen - which I typically sit at during idle. The four apps on the bottom are the most likely ones I’ll use when my phone is unlocked: Camera, Twitter, Hangouts, and Chrome. Absent is the phone icon, which can be accessed from the lockscreen. I don’t use the phone app often enough to warrant it sitting there. Camera, one could argue could be removed by the same reasoning, but actually serves as encouragement to me to capture more photos (something I enjoy doing for journaling). Hangouts is my primary text communication app – all Google Voice SMS, carrier SMS, and of course, Hangouts messages, are routed through there. Twitter is present, as it serves as my biggest time killer throughout the day.
The only oddity about this screen is the Inbox icon. I don’t need it, but the Google Now launcher has a caveat – it will delete empty homescreens. I like to keep at least one screen clear, for the wallpaper. It’s not as if I use it for anything else.
Secondary Screen #
The second screen will look completely foreign to most. It serves a single widget, App Dialer Pro. T9 predates full keyboards on phones, and is quite a lot slower for text messaging when compared to QWERTY. For things like app names and contact names, however, tapping two large touch targets for two letters often locates the app I need quickly. The top bar serves as a “search results” pane, displaying the top three matches for a T9 input phrase. In idle, it shows the three most recently used items. My app drawer has seven pages of icons, and when I’m looking for something, I prefer to just tap out exactly what I’m looking for. App dialer is to Alfred as the App Drawer is to the Start Menu.
That’s how I accomplish everything I need using two homescreens, and Google Now exclusively. Simple, elegant, and efficient.