Lawnchair

Lawnchair is a free, open-source home screen app for Android. It starts from Launcher3, the launcher code in the Android Open Source Project, and adds the features people usually want from a Pixel launcher on a phone that doesn’t ship with one: Material You colours taken from your wallpaper, an At a Glance widget, a universal search bar, and icon pack support. On top of that come the controls Pixel Launcher never had, such as icon size, labels, and the number of rows and columns on the home screen and in the app drawer.

This page is for the Lawnchair 15 beta. That build is not on Google Play.

Which Lawnchair is this?

Three different apps carry the Lawnchair name. They have different package names, so Android treats them as separate apps. You can install them side by side, but your settings won’t move between them.

If you want the stable release and automatic updates through the Play Store, get the Play version. This beta is for people who want the Android 15-based code before it reaches Play. The developers are clear about the trade-off: these are betas of the next version, to be used at your own risk.

What the beta does

The feature list below comes from the project’s own description of this build:

• Material You theming: colours follow your wallpaper and system theme.
• At a Glance: the date and weather widget at the top of the home screen. It works with Smartspacer, an app that adds more cards to it.
• Global search: find apps, contacts and web results from the home screen.
• Icon packs, plus a customisable search pill.
• Layout controls: icon size, labels, rows and columns.
• QuickSwitch support: on Android 10 and later, Lawnchair can take over the Recents screen. This one needs root.

What stands out in the APK

The file is 17.3 MB, and the “What’s inside” section below lists everything we measured. Three things are worth knowing before you install.

No trackers. None of the 432 tracker signatures in the Exodus Privacy list match any code in this build.

57 permissions, but most will never be granted. The long list looks alarming until you read where it comes from. Lawnchair inherits Launcher3’s manifest, and Launcher3 is written to be the phone’s built-in launcher. 25 of the permissions are system-level ones, such as STATUS_BAR, MANAGE_USERS and INTERACT_ACROSS_USERS_FULL. Android only grants those to apps that ship with the phone. On a normal install they are simply ignored. They only matter if Lawnchair runs as a system app, which is what the root-only QuickSwitch setup does.

The permissions that can actually reach your data come in two kinds. Eight of them Android asks you about first: contacts (used by global search), photos, videos, audio, notifications and direct calling. Two more, all-files access and usage access, stay off until you turn them on yourself in Settings. None of the ten is granted just by installing the app.

Runs on any Android 8.0 or newer phone. The build contains native code for all four CPU types (64-bit and 32-bit ARM, 64-bit and 32-bit Intel). It targets Android 15, so newer permission rules apply to it.

Installing it

1. Download the APK above. We have already matched its signing key to the one IzzyOnDroid publishes for Lawnchair (the fingerprint is under More Information). Android checks the signature again when it installs, and refuses a file that has been altered.
2. Allow your browser or file manager to install unknown apps when Android asks.
3. Open Lawnchair, then set it as your default home app in Settings › Apps › Default apps › Home app.

Updates to the beta are not automatic. Check back here, or use an update tool that reads the IzzyOnDroid repository.

Who should skip it

• You want something stable enough that you never have to think about your launcher. The Play Store version is the better choice.
• You rely on the Google Discover feed to the left of the home screen. The project says Lawnchair supports it, but that support has historically needed a separate companion app, and we haven’t tested it in this beta.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the IzzyOnDroid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.