Smart Launcher Review

[Tavarus Calamia]

Thebest Android launchers are the ideal tools for personalizing and customizing your Android experience. User choice has long been one of the best things about the Android ecosystem, and launchers ramp that up to 11. They give you the chance to tinker and alter the best Android phones in ways the stock launcher can only dream of.

Some of the best launchers are designed to let you change almost everything about Android, while others are built for a more minimalist experience. But if that's not for you there are even launchers offering a smorgasboard of color that would put painting aisle at the hardware store to shame.

You can't talk about the best Android launchers without a mention of Nova Launcher. Fast, sleek and highly customizable, Nova Launcher balances extensive appearance and utility customizations with a minimal performance impact, letting you set your home screen just right without slowing down performance.

There are a lot of options to work through, from color themes to icon packs, scrollable docks to app drawer customizations, to folder settings and infinite scrolling. The Nova team is never content to rest on its laurels, continuously adding new features, such as Sesame Shortcuts, animations, and other improvements.

Niagara is a lean Android launcher designed to place your apps and notifications front and center, while keeping other distractions to a minimum. Notifications are displayed right on your home screen, with spam and persistent notifications automatically filtered out. The app drawer automatically surfaces your favorite apps, while also providing handy alphabetical shortcuts.

That said, Niagara's extreme minimalism means that you shouldn't be expecting any unusual visual frills and options you might expect from most third-party launchers. it is updated frequently and it shows great promise.

Smart Launcher has long been a favorite for the best Android launcher, with its simple "flower" favorites grid and sorted app folder. The latest version, Smart Launcher 5, adds a ton of features and refinements.

Smart Launcher's flower grid is still available, but it's joined by a number of other well thought-out layouts designed to keep your favorite apps within easy reach of one hand, while smart search and an intelligently sorted and customizable app drawer makes it easy to find whatever you need, whether on your phone or out in the web. Adaptive icons and colors, fully resizable widgets, and more customizations round out the package, making for a great update to a classic launcher.

While AIO Launcher is free, in-app purchases unlock other features such as widget support, app icons, and Android notifications in the home screen stream. It's not the friendliest interface out there among the best Android launchers, it's still an interesting choice if information density isn't a turn-off for you.

Action Launcher Pixel Edition was among the first of the big third party launchers to give itself a Pixel-style makeover, combining its extreme customizability with new interface features and styles introduced with the Pixel Launcher.

Action Launcher includes an adaptive app bar, the pill-shaped Google search bar, and Oreo-style app shortcuts (backward compatible to Android 5). A slide-out app drawer provides users with quick access to an app library and widgets. Special gestures such as "covers" and "shutters" allow for speedy access.

Core features include the ability to customize the home screen grid size, with up to nine screens, as well as a scrollable dock with up to five pages. Infinite scrolling, transition animations, numerous folder styles and multiple app drawer styles add even greater customization.

Xiaomi's phones, like the new Xiaomi Mi 11, might not be widely available in the US, but you can get a taste of the Poco Launcher through the Google Play Store. The Poco Launcher deviates from Xiaomi's usual design sensibilities, offering an app drawer complete with smart category tabs that automatically sort apps into groups like Communication and Photography.

The launcher offers a customizable screen layout, transition effects, icon pack support, and notification badges. It doesn't offer as many deep customizations as rival launchers, but it does look nice and is designed to be on the streamlined end of things. And recent additions include dark mode support and the ability to lock your phone by tapping the screen.

Microsoft rebranded its excellent Arrow Launcher into the Microsoft Launcher, keeping Arrow's compact, context-sensitive app pages and customizable feed, while also working to improve the interplay between your Android phone and Windows PC.

Users can quickly snap photos from the phone and view them on their desktop; they can also open web links from mobile to Edge on PC, or start editing Office 365 documents from their PC and continue on the go with their mobile phone.

We went hands-on with every launcher on this list, which is how we drew the above conclusions on ranking. A launcher is a very personal thing, but we value the ones that give you a lot of functionality, even if the feature set itself is minimal.

In the end, we encourage you to try out different launchers to see which one you like best. You might find the more feature-packed options to be overwhelming, in which case you may want to look at one of the lighter ones.

The way we arrange, organize, and interact with our apps on Android is called the launcher. Launchers usually consist of a series of home screens, where we can arrange app shortcuts and widgets while the rest of our apps sit in an app drawer. From the best Android phones to the most basic budget smartphone, every phone comes with a launcher.

Some built-in launchers are great, but when they drop the ball, there are endless third-party launchers that not only pick it up again but knock it clear out of the park. Some even allow you to apply your own custom icon packs, giving you complete control. Everyone has their perfect launcher, but if you haven't found your favorite yet, then here are the best Android launchers that we at Android Central have used and loved for years.

Smart Launcher has been around for years and years, but it really kicked things up a notch with Smart Launcher 6. The home screen features a grid-less widget placement system and modular page system, but the real star of the show here is still the app drawer. Smart Launcher 6 automatically sorts your apps into several categories, and if you pay for Smart Launcher Pro, you can add your own custom categories and sort your various drawer tabs in a variety of ways, from most-used to install time to icon color.

From a responsive and comprehensive categorical app drawer to some of the most precise widget placement on Android to the most diverse icon options of any smartphone, Smart Launcher 6 has a lot to love. Its gestures are top-notch, too, especially the double-tap shortcuts for dock apps, which work worlds better than the swipe app shortcuts Nova and Action use.

Smart Launcher is also part of the holy trinity of quick home screen theming I've used for the last three years. You can even combine it with Android 13's Material You and Smart Launcher's Icon Pack Studio to build a home screen experience that will automatically mesh with any and every wallpaper you set on the phone.

Nova Launcher has been a major player in the home screen market longer than most of us have even used Android. The reason for this continued dominance is simple. Nova's mix of customization, convenience, and cunning is unparalleled. Nova lets your phone look more Pixel-y than a Pixel and does it all with ease and grace. It also lets you build a home screen that is unique, stable, and solid while being as plain or beautiful as you'd like.

A wide feature set allows Nova to achieve all these wonderful themes and let users build exactly the home screen they want, with small but infinitely useful features like subgrid positioning and a robust backup system. For users just getting used to third-party launchers, the "import from other launchers" feature is the most consistent and reliable on Nova than just about every other launcher I've tried in previous years.

If you want to ease yourself from the basic launcher to a custom experience, Nova can help you get comfortable with launcher layouts and themes. It's relatively easier for new users to jump in while still being as flexible as ever for those of us who are ridiculously picky when it comes to theming our home screens.

From its robust gesture controls to its ubiquitous Covers and Shutters to hide folders and widgets under app icons, Action Launcher makes it easy to get the home screen you want. If Quicktheme's color palette misses the mark, you can set Material palette colors or custom hex code colors to get a more cohesive look! This makes Action Launcher much more useful to live wallpaper users and themers.

The feature set here has been steadily growing over the last year, and Niagara really hit its stride around the summer of 2021 when the Galaxy Z Fold 3 arrived and brought foldables mainstream. Niagara Launcher was very quick to adapt its minimal launcher into a big-screen-friendly launcher and in fact, if you're looking for an all-business launcher for your Z Fold 3 or Z Fold 4, Niagara has both one-column and two-column setups you can use to get to your next app and get back to work lickety-split.

If you just want to find your apps quickly and get on with your day, Niagara Launcher is a pretty great answer. It reminds me a bit of the old Z Launcher from several years ago, if you remember Nokia's experimental launcher, but I think this one is going to be around for a good while.

While you may not be able to spread out all your apps and widgets on five different screens, this vertically scrolling launcher is lightning quick and works well on phones that more bloated launchers start to lag on.

Microsoft Launcher's experience centers around a clean home screen and a smart page to the left fed by your Microsoft account, your daily phone use, and any Android widgets you wish to add. Even if you're not immersed in the Microsoft ecosystem, having a scrolling page of widgets beats having to space them out over 3-4 pages. While this launcher's settings are somewhat clunky, it has all the launcher options you'd want and then some.

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