Declined Features #

μLauncher aims to be minimal software. This necessitates to decline certain feature suggestions (which is of course always a hard decision). The following is a list of features suggested to me, which I ultimately decided not to implement. Please do not request these features again. If these are essential features for you, check out the plethora of other FOSS launchers available.

Daily Wallpapers #

This is possible using a live wallpaper.

Apps on the Home Screen #

This doesn’t fit μLauncher’s concept well. Moreover, it is possible to achieve this using widgets.

Fancy Clock Faces #

Use widgets instead.

Protect Apps With a Password #

While this might sound like a reasonable security feature at first, it is actually not something a launcher (or any non-system app for that matter) can do. For example, one can always go to System Settings > Apps and launch apps from there or just install a different home screen without any artificial restrictions. Thus such a feature would only give a false sense of security. If some of your apps need additional protection, use Android’s private space instead.

Termux Action #

Use Termux:Widget instead.

Search Contacts #

It has been suggested to add a feature to search contacts from μLauncher. However:

• There is not much gained by adding this functionality to μLauncher. What would the UX for a contact search in μLauncher look like? There would be a new action that opens a list of contacts. However, instead of using this action, one can just bind any contacts app to a gesture. Keeping things separate has several advantages:

  • it allows to replace the home screen and the contact searching apps independently,
  • it allows to update them independently,
  • no single app gets excessive permissions,
  • the workload of maintaining μLauncher stays reasonably manageable.

• Accessing contacts is a sensitive permission. I don’t want my home screen to access my contact book.

• Implementing such a feature in μLauncher would only work for the contacts of the user profile where μLauncher is installed. μLauncher can list apps from all profiles through the LauncherApps API, but there is no way to access contacts from other profiles (for a very good reason).

Here is overview of alternatives suggested by users. Also see #119.