In the past few months I’ve got heaps of emails asking me to turn the Fake iPhone 4S app into a home screen / launcher. Since the iPhone 5 will be released soon, I thought this would be a good time to put in some work to make this happen.
I’ve put together an early testing version if anyone would like to give it a spin:
At present it just lists all your installed apps, with a bit of visual styling and a quick search feature. It doesn’t have some of the common features in an Android launcher. But I think it’s already a lot better than the old app.
Anyway - I’d love to hear your thoughts. What should be changed? What works well at the moment? What would be the most important new features?
omething seems to be wrong for me.
I can’t see any apps, if i go to the left though I will still see the search bar. The apps seems to be there however since when I click anywhere on the screen an app will open.
I attached a screenshot so you can see how it looks like
Btw, nice icon!
Thanks for letting me know. Looks like this is a quirk with the way older Android SDKs layout Windows (the view was getting a tremendously large height, which stretched everything off the screen!). It worked on both my phones, and the 4.0 emulator interestingly.
Thats why I test everything on Android 2.1 and 2.3.3.
It still has the biggest userbase and some strange behaviors that changed in later versions of Android.
hi david
i install the apk in my phone(v2.2) and try it, and come with this thing:
1- take too much time to load app in screen.
2- there is no icon for app
3- if the app name big not show all name.
Tried you latest version. It is showing the icons for me on android 2.3.3. At first it just showed square blue and red icons for my apps, then (i guess after it loaded) a few seconds later it shows the actual app icons. This is really cool so far One thing I would like to see, before when I hit the menu button on the home screen some quick menu items popped up, where I could go to settings, wallpapers and stuff like that. I realize you have settings icon on the home screen but would still like a menu for some quick launch things like settings. First time I’ve used a home/launcher replacement how do I change it back to stock? This is something I will probably have a lot of fun with though.
The loading time takes very long. It might be an idea to work with a cached list. You could then load the actual list in the background and update the ui once the loading is done. The first time you could show a dialog with the text “setting up for first time use” or something like that.
My sense ui does an actual loading almost every time I go to the app screen and it sucks. Even with the real time updating it is a pain because you cannot click on any icon because at the time you click the icon the list is updated and the icon is moved. I Always think, “why don’t they just cache the list?”
Also the search screen is a bit strange. When I slide to the search screen I see the search box and then google search pops up.
It’s working now.
The icons doesn’t load for me either, only boxes in different colours.
I agree with Martin about the search screen. Maybe it would be better if it would show results for apps installed for quick access. Then if you click enter/search (the button that will dismiss the keyboard) it could go to the Google search app instead, just an idea…
I’ve just uploaded a new version which adds a few features. Now if you press the Menu key, a popup menu will appear. This lets you:
[ul]
[li]Change your default launcher (i.e. go back to stock)
[/li][li]Set the wallpaper (this app now uses the system wallpaper)
[/li][li]Quick access to Settings, and
[/li][li]An option to refresh the app list manually
[/li][/ul]
That should improve things a bit. Caching is something I’m working on, but is actually a difficult problem to solve (in terms of serialising Intents & caching icon drawables)
That’s probably what I’ll end up needing to do. But I need to run some tests to discover what’s the slowest part of loading the application list. I think getting the raw list of applications from the system is quick enough - the slow bit is actually loading icons & the default Intent. Which means storing it in a database may not help much.
Does it actually do the “slow load” every time for you, or just the first time? On both my test phones, it stays in memory so I don’t see the loading screen again unless I manually kill the app.
I looked at a few possibilities here. Building my own quick search would be possible, but it wouldn’t have the “universal” aspects that Android and iOS both have in the built-in search box. So ultimately I decided it would be best to just activate the built-in functionality with the system.
If it’s confusing though, this might be something I could build up for a future version. Would it make more sense if I just got rid of the “Search Phone” box on that screen?
It just feels like it’s not the expected behaviour. The first time i got really surprised when it opened an application and I tried to exit it before I understood that it actually was the search.
I don’t think you need to remove the box as, for me at least, you barely even see it before the search app opens.
Thanks all for your feedback! I’ve released the first version on Google Play: Fake iPhone 5 Launcher.
I’ll continue working on improvements based on the feedback. The load time especially needs some work. I had to do some weird business to get icons to load properly on older Android versions. This has resulted in an increased load time across the board. It’s not too bad if your device has enough RAM to keep the launcher in memory, but it could be painful if it reloads every time.
Odd behavior:
Coincidentally, when presented with full screen “app wall”, I pressed the Home button and “Complete this action with HTC Sense”. Then I ran Fake iPhone 5 again and was taken directly to the app wall again. “No thanks” did not close the app wall. The Back button did not close the app wall. Finally I realized that Home would get me back to the fake iPhone 5 Home.
Also got a Force Close after clicking on the calculator icon. Sent in a crash report. Haven’t been able to reproduce.
One thing I would like to see, before when I hit the menu button on the home screen some quick menu items popped up, where I could go to settings, wallpapers and stuff like that. I realize you have settings icon on the home screen but would still like a menu for some quick launch things like settings. First time I’ve used a home/launcher replacement 