In 2021, I made one of the worst choices of my life buying the Nokia 3.4. It’s a painfully slow device at times, so not running too many apps and sticking to light apps is always good. Earlier this week I felt the need to search again for a minimalist launcher to see if I could speed up my phone and came across Olauncher, an open source launcher that presents you with a nice silent home screen that makes so my device feels a bit snappier.
After installation, you are presented with four slots where you can add your favorite apps. If you need more or less choice than that, you can long-press on the wallpaper and change the number of favorites to anything from zero to eight – I’ve got six pinned apps at the time of writing , a few messaging apps, and a few side-hustle apps that I like to check out to earn some pocket money.
As this is a minimalist launcher, the notification bar fades out so you don’t get distracted, but you can easily see all the notifications that have come in by swiping down to open the full notification interface . Swiping up will display all installed apps as a long list, unlike other minimalist launchers, Olauncher does something quite special.
When you swipe up you are presented with your keyboard to start searching for the app you want to open. To save time, the launcher will open the app you want halfway through typing as soon as it becomes the only option in your app list. For example, if I want to open Facebook, I just type fac and the launcher starts launching Facebook because there are no other apps on my device that start with ‘fac’.
As mentioned earlier, the launcher comes with a limited number of spaces on the home screen for your apps. To save you two slots, there are shortcuts on the home screen to open the camera and the phone. Swiping from left to right will open the phone app, while swiping the other way will open your camera. I haven’t found myself accidentally invoking any of these shortcuts yet, so that’s promising.
Earlier today I was reading more about the app in the play store and found out that it has a hidden apps feature. While other users of the launcher will probably know it, people who don’t use it will never know where to look for your secret apps! To hide an app, just go to your apps list and long press. You will see an option to hide it, tap on it to remove it from your apps list. To see your hidden apps, you have to long press on the home screen and at the top of the settings menu, tap on the title “Olauncher”, this will show you all the hidden apps if there are any.
Talking about the settings menu, here you can enable features like show status bar, change daily wallpaper and change position of your favorite apps list. There is also an option to view Olauncher’s public roadmap. On the roadmap page, the developer of Olauncher says adding new features isn’t too difficult, but making sure everything works on all device form factors is what takes time. Hopefully this thoughtful approach ensures Olauncher remains a great pitcher.
From a development perspective, Olauncher is also good because it is open source. If you are a new coder and want to help build your coding experience, you are free to contribute to this project, and if you want to create your own launcher, you can fork over the Olauncher project and get to work. Its open source nature also means that it’s available for download on the F-Droid app store as well as the Google Play Store – this makes it easy to download and install if your device doesn’t have the Google Play Store.
Olauncher is quite minimalistic, so it will probably appeal more to people who prefer a spartan interface. That said, the overall experience is very good, and that could expand its appeal to a wider audience. I have enabled the daily wallpaper option setting on my phone and I find the wallpaper choices to be quite good and make excellent use of any free space on the home screen , making the device generally pleasing to the eye.
If you give it a try, setup shouldn’t take too long, just follow the prompts to make it your default launcher and choose your favorite apps, and you’re good to go. Unless I find something really annoying in this launcher, I’d probably say this is my favorite launcher on Android.
