µLauncher

µLauncher is a home screen app by Josia Pietsch, a fork of Finn Glas’s Launcher. Its own description: it “lets you launch apps using swipe gestures and button presses. It is minimal, efficient and free of distraction.” The home screen shows only the date, the time and your wallpaper; everything you open, you open with a gesture or from the app list.

Gestures and actions

• Gestures: swipes in four directions, with two fingers, along the screen edges and diagonally; drawn shapes (<, >, V, Λ); taps on the date or time; double tap and long press; the back button; and the volume keys. Diagonal swipes are off by default.
• What a gesture can do: open an app, the full app list, your favourites or the private space list; control music; open the notification shade or Quick Settings; turn on the torch; lock the screen; or open a panel of widgets.
• Out of the box: back or swipe up opens the app list, double tap locks the screen, a long press opens the settings, and some gestures are pre-assigned to the first matching app you have installed, such as a browser for swipe down.
• Widgets can sit on the home screen or in separate widget panels. They don’t respond to touches unless you allow it.

Work profile and private space

Apps from a work profile appear in the normal list (the documentation mentions Shelter), and on Android 15 and later µLauncher can lock and unlock the private space with a dedicated action. For that it has to be your default home screen; Android requires it. One limit in this version: Android’s setting to hide the private space while locked can’t be read by third-party launchers, so µLauncher can’t honour it. The developer has since added a way round this, but not in a release yet.

Locking the screen

There are two ways, and the documentation admits that “both have downsides”:

• Device admin (the default) “doesn’t work with unlocking by fingerprint or face recognition”: after locking this way, you need your PIN, pattern or password.
• Accessibility service “requires excessive privileges”; µLauncher says it uses them “only for locking the screen”, and the service’s configuration doesn’t let it read window contents or watch any app. Enabling it asks you to confirm four statements first. The documentation also warns that on some devices, turning on an accessibility service stops the start-up PIN being used to encrypt data until you set it again.

What it connects to

Nothing. µLauncher has no internet permission, and its documentation states: “µLauncher does not connect to the internet. Functionality that would require an internet connection will not be implemented. In particular, µLauncher contains no ads and no trackers.” An optional web search, off by default, hands what you typed to your browser.

If µLauncher crashes, it posts a notification instead of sending a report: “For privacy reasons, µLauncher does not collect crash reports automatically”. That is what the notification permission is for; you can then copy the report, e-mail it or open a GitHub issue yourself.

The permissions it asks for

• Query all packages: “In order to launch apps, µLauncher obtains a list of all apps installed on the device”, including those in other profiles.
• Hidden profiles: Android 15’s permission for launchers to see the private space.
• Expand status bar: for the actions that open notifications or Quick Settings.
• Request uninstall: the Uninstall item in an app’s long-press menu.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 0.2.12, signed by Josia Pietsch. F-Droid distributes the same developer-signed file, and it is also identical to the APK on the project’s GitHub releases. The developer’s published fingerprint covers the F-Droid, GitHub and Google Play builds, so a Play installation can be updated with this file; the README adds of Google Play, “I don’t recommend that.”
• New in 0.2.12: improved widget configuration, widgets from other profiles, and an adjustable clock size.
• The screenshots date from late 2024 and don’t show the newer widget panels or diagonal gestures.
• The 4.1 MB file has no native code, needs Android 5.0 or later and declares 6 permissions. Our scan found no trackers.
• µLauncher is licensed under the MIT licence.

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