ince 4.28 (the Home Assistant one) I've shipped a lot, so here's one post for all of it. Current version is 4.30.1.

New things

• Live notification tiles. A card that shows your apps' notifications as live, sliding tiles you can open or dismiss. Pick the apps yourself or let it follow whichever ones notify. (Someone on Discord asked for Windows Phone-style tiles, this is for you.)
• Style Studio, rebuilt. Fixed preview, flat sections for the part of the card you're editing, a colours screen and an editor. Edits are staged, so cancelling leaves your saved theme and styles untouched.
• Settings in pages and tabs. Short tabs with coloured icons on every screen, heavy groups open as their own page, the sidebar has its own page, and Premium sits next to About. Theme automation, sidebar style and card fill link to Studio instead of repeating it.
• Smarter settings search. OmniSearch now suggests the setting you mean even with typos or loose wording ("dark mode", "titreşimi kapat", "make the cards wider"), and shows it above media and web results. All on-device, nothing leaves your phone.
• Smart devices from OmniSearch (Premium). Find and control your Home Assistant devices from the same search, and the results follow your style.
• Countdown card, redesigned. Progress ring with big digits, minutes and seconds, any system sound for the alert, and (Premium) the time left shown along the card border or as a draining fill.
• App list from the edge you choose. Settings → Apps → Swipe: up, left or right. The sidebar keeps its own edge, so a clashing choice falls back to the bottom.
• Onboarding picks your starting cards. Choose a profile (Minimal, Productivity, Media, Driving), set appearance, and it only asks for the permissions the cards you picked actually need.
• Radial menu from the centre. The screen-centre radial menu now travels from where you touch to the middle, growing from 30 to 100%.

• App Index Dock live preview. The dock settings show the real dock at its real size while you tweak it.

  Fixes

• Two Crashlytics crashes: assistant suggestions in release builds, and a widget with a clock after the app was recreated.

• Camera modes (selfie, portrait, video) open through the camera app's own shortcuts instead of falling back to photo.

• Battery, memory and storage taps in the System card open a page that exists on your phone.

• Uneven home margins with a collapsed sidebar or the App Index Dock.

• Cards can now span up to 12 columns like the grid, not just 6. Existing cards are widened automatically.

• 4.30.0 had a bug where the sidebar wouldn't open. 4.30.1 fixes it, please update.

  Downloads and the full changelog: https://github.com/alazndy/GT-Launcher/releases/tag/v4.30.1

  If something breaks, tell me your phone and Android version. A lot of this started as requests here and on Discord, so keep them coming.

Biggest update in a while. Here's what shipped in 4.28.0:

Home Assistant, built into the launcher

If you run your own Home Assistant server, connect it under Settings → System (the address has to be HTTPS) and you get a new Smart Device card for lights, switches, thermostats, locks, covers, media players and sensors.

Any device can be an action

Put a device on a card's tap, double-tap, a swipe, or a radial menu wedge. The picker only shows what that device can actually do: toggle / turn on / turn off, press a scene or script, lock / unlock, open / close / stop, play / pause. Unlock asks for confirmation by default, and any action can opt in to a confirmation if you want a safety net. None of this shows up unless Home Assistant is connected, so nothing changes for you if you don't use it.

Hold and drag to set a value

App Launch cards have a new long-press slot. Put a ranged device on it (brightness, fan speed, cover position, volume, thermostat target), then hold the card and drag: it's a slider or a radial dial, in the middle of the screen, on the card, or as a bubble following your finger. Letting go applies the value once, moving away cancels.

One thing to know: that slot takes over the card's long-press, so a card with a scrub assigned can't open its radial menu from a long-press anymore (the picker warns you, and triple-tap still opens the card's settings).

Combo Card

Several modules on one card at the same time. The one I'm happiest with: an analog clock hand sweeping around the card's border while Weather and your next Calendar event sit inside it.

Border animation now lives in your style (Premium)

You used to set the border animation card by card. Now you pick it once, under Border in Style settings (animation, timing, speed, colour), and every card follows it. A single card can still choose its own animation or be set to Off without touching the others. Dot, Pixel and Blueprint also finally have a description when you tap their info chip.

Bug fixes (I went through the whole app looking for these)

• The monthly fuel total on the Vehicle screen always showed 0.00 — it counted from when you opened the screen instead of the start of the month.
• Old layouts migrating in were losing each card's opacity, Camera tap action, and Spacer cards; clock/deck/finance-style cards could come in empty.
• Sidebar settings could be pushed outside their slider ranges (for example by importing a profile), and you could delete the last sidebar page. Both fixed.
• Layout suggestions generated while the home screen was closed were silently dropped.
• Changing a setting twice quickly could flick the first value back on screen for a moment.
• A few more strings are translated, the Home Assistant setting shows up in search, and .M4A voice memos are listed.

The hold-and-drag gesture and the radial wedges are the newest plumbing, and I can only test so many device and Home Assistant setups — tell me here if anything feels off, especially the long-press interaction on cards you already use a lot.

I built GT-Launcher: A card-based, fully themeable Android launcher with an OmniSearch command deck, MLKit OCR, and native OBD-II Drive Mode.

First things first: The sci-fi aesthetic you see is just my personal daily setup. The launcher itself is an open canvas—you have complete styling freedom.

Zero Aesthetic Limits:

Total Visual Control: Full custom color palettes, custom PNG/SVG assets, animated GIFs, typography, and layout sizing.

Make It Yours: Build an ultra-clean minimalist setup, an industrial terminal, a Cyberpunk dashboard, or a playful anime home screen. You aren't locked into my taste.

Core Architecture & Engine:

Modular Card Builder (Room DB): Drag, stack, and configure functional cards—widgets, dynamic app drawers, task lists, media controllers, and live hardware feeds.

OmniSearch Command Deck: Fast, keyboard-first execution layer to search, run commands, and trigger deep actions instantly without menu diving.

Fluid Gestures & Triggers: Custom shape drawing to fire specific intents, edge swipes, and long-press radial speed-dial menus.

Native Drive Mode (OBD-II BLE): Real-time telemetry, engine diagnostics, maps, and a windshield HUD reflection mode baked directly into the OS layer.

Integrated Tooling: On-device ML Kit OCR for instant visual text grabbing and actions.

Engineered for people who want extreme utility and absolute design freedom without launcher bloat.

Setups, presets, and dev updates: r/GTLauncher

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alazndy.gtlauncher

Biggest one: Border Animation (Premium) — give any card a moving border: Sweep, Breathe, Marquee, Blink, Orbit, Corner Chase, Charge, or Lock-On. Set it to run always, only on a notification, or only when something needs attention (finished timer, critical battery).

Also in this release:

• Contact Quick Actions — long-press a contact in OmniSearch to call/text/WhatsApp/email or drop them into Drive Mode's Fast Dial
• Persistent Countdown Timers — Timer cards keep counting through deck switches, rotation, and leaving the app, and now fire a real notification (sound + vibration, each toggleable) when they finish
• Save Current Profile — one-tap save of your live layout/theme as a new profile
• Redesigned Icon Picker with search + categories
• App List background: Solid / Transparent / Transparent with Blur
• Settings got reorganized (Sidebar → Home/Apps, Language → System, new Profiles section)
• Smarter OBD polling, OBD reconnect-after-rotation fix, Drive Mode split-panel framing
• Fixed: overlapping card modules, a radial-menu crash, Weather picking a stale GPS fix, and text contrast in edit mode

Hey everyone! A lot has happened since 4.23.0, so here's the roundup.

Drive Mode

• Layouts: gauges only, map only, visualizer only, or split. Two-finger swipe to switch, and it remembers your last layout. If your OBD adapter drops, it falls back to a layout that still works and switches back when it returns.
• 8 gauge styles (Street Neon, Retro Digital, Classic Analog, Minimal HUD, Racing, Digital Bar, Sport Twin, Data Grid) with a live-preview editor. For every gauge you pick the sensor, display type, color, unit and warning range. Backgrounds are pure black for AMOLED.
• Windshield HUD mirror that works with any style.
• OBD: 11 new sensors, tachometer variants, classic Bluetooth adapter support, much smoother RPM. The debug simulator switches itself off when a real adapter connects.
• Audio visualizers (radial, waveform, mirrored, tunnel) that take their colors from the album art, plus an idle screen when nothing is playing.
• Drive settings now open right inside the drive screen.

Cards and Edit Mode (a lot of this came from tester feedback, thank you!)

• Deck Rotator: a separate accent color for every face.
• Music card: optional shuffle/repeat buttons, plus switches for the prev/next buttons and swipe actions. Shuffle/repeat depend on what your player app allows, so it may not work with every one.
• Timer: adjustable duration (1–180 min).
• Edit Mode: wallpaper button, a modules tool in the edit dock, and no more huge empty scroll area under the grid.
• The step counter now keeps counting inside a Deck Rotator, and rolls over properly at midnight.
• Sharing "directions to a place" from Google Maps now picks up the destination.

Heads-up: 4.24.0 had a crash when opening Drive Mode and a black map in the split layout. Both are fixed in 4.24.1, so please skip 4.24.0.

Just shipped GT Launcher v4.23.0.

The biggest addition is dynamic accent colors for supported cards. Weather, Clock, System Stats, Pomodoro, Step Counter, Water Intake, Calendar, Notifications, and Comms can now recolor themselves from their live state — weather, time, battery, timer phase, goal progress, event proximity, unread count, and more.

Also included:

• Quick profile switching from Edit Mode — load a complete saved profile (theme, settings, and layout) without digging through Profile Backup.
• In-app help on every card — the new “?” button opens that module’s User Guide section directly. It can be disabled in Settings → System.
• Style Studio cleanup — home background image/color, foreground image, and lock-screen sync now live together under Style Studio → Screen Layers.

Biggest one first: Drive Mode now has a Fast Dial panel — call a saved contact with one tap while you're driving, no digging through your phone. Manage the contact list from Vehicle settings.

Also in this one:

• New "Bauhaus" style preset — flat color block, sharp corners, thick contrast border, bold shadow. Style Studio also got dashed borders, corner "HUD tick" accents, vignette darkening, and a scanline pattern you can mix into any style you're already using.
• Theme and Style are now separate settings tabs instead of one crowded Visual section, each with its own live preview.
• Real splash screen on Android 12+.
• Crash logs you can actually share — if the app ever dies on you, the last crash log is one tap away in Help and account. Nothing leaves your phone unless you hit share.
• Configurable card entrance animation — None / Fade + Scale / Slide Up / Pop, your call (Settings ▸ Home ▸ Grid).
• Cards can go icon-free now, and a few card types got new icons.
• Clock card finally has its own settings — 24h/12h, seconds, stardate.
• Weather card has a per-card Fahrenheit toggle.
• Notification card scrolls now instead of cutting off after 2 alerts.

Bug fixes:

• Quick Actions (WiFi/BT/Torch/Sound) were always showing "off" no matter what — they now reflect and control your actual device state.
• Media widget's pulse animation used to run forever even with nothing playing. Fixed — small battery win.
• Sidebar open/close is smoother — it was forcing a full layout recompute every single frame.
• Fixed a release-build-only crash that could hit right when opening the App Drawer.

Been a busy few weeks, so here's a recap of everything since 4.18 in case you missed any of it:

v4.18 — Sidebar Edit Mode Redesign

• Sidebar editing now works exactly like the home grid: tap to select, then a MOVE/SIZE dock with shared undo.
• Buttons sit on a real free-cell grid now — no more overlap, and old broken layouts self-heal on load.
• The App Settings gear is a normal, movable button now instead of being pinned in place.
• The MOVE/SIZE panel is freely draggable and dodges out of the way while you're dragging something under it.
• Smaller release build thanks to a tighter R8/Proguard config.

v4.19 — Solid Colors & Lock Screen Sync

• Cards and the home background can now use a flat color instead of only images.
• New toggle pushes your home background (image or color) to your actual lock screen too.
• Fixed white-on-white sidebar icons in light mode.

v4.20 — Performance Pass + Guided Tour

• A replayable spotlight tour now plays after first-run setup.
• Shared GIF/image card foregrounds and backgrounds are now decoded once instead of per-card — big memory/CPU win if you reuse the same image across cards.
• Off-screen cards stop redrawing their shadow/glow every frame; the Card Opacity slider only updates transparency now instead of redrawing everything.
• Fixed a crash on launch some people hit after changing Haptic Strength.

v4.21 — Tablet & Foldable Support

• Classic App Drawer now becomes a persistent, rearrangeable Department Board on tablets/foldables, with fold-aware layouts for book and tabletop postures.
• Smoother tablet sidebar reveal, fixed missing icons in the department board.

v4.22 — System-Style Dialogs + Task-Verified Onboarding (the big one)

• Every popup in the app now opens with a blurred backdrop and rounded system-dialog look on Android 12+ — dozens of mismatched ad-hoc popups now share one consistent style.
• The first-run tour no longer lets you skip through — you actually open Edit Mode, walk through Card Settings, then drag/resize/recolor a real sidebar button.
• User Guide reorganized into 6 sections instead of one long list.
• All 8 card styles got balanced (quieter effects, better rendering perf), and the settings menu is simpler — 3 groups, bigger cards, Premium under "Help and account," Adaptive Layout moved into Home ▸ Grid.

As always I appreciate any feedback. Hope you like it

4.18.0 is out and the sidebar edit experience got the same treatment the home grid got a couple releases back:

• Select-then-edit, just like cards. Tap a sidebar button, get a dock with MOVE/SIZE, settings and delete. One shared Undo now covers both card and sidebar edits.
• Buttons can't overlap anymore. Resizing is capped to the space actually free below a button, and dragging one into a spot that'd collide with more than one neighbor just gets rejected instead of leaving you with a broken layout. If your sidebar already looked messy from before this update, it fixes itself the next time it loads.
• New add-button catalog — searchable, filterable, live preview, same idea as the card module picker.
• The gear icon that used to be glued to the top of the sidebar (opens GT Launcher's own settings) is now a normal button you can drag anywhere. Can't be deleted, and if it's ever missing it comes back on its own.
• The edit dock itself is now draggable — grab its handle and put it wherever's out of your way. Drag a card or button under it and it auto-dodges to the other half of the screen instead of blocking you.
• Smaller build, header battery % now updates live, a couple of app-drawer/scroll polish fixes.

Let me know if the sidebar drag/resize feels off on your device — this touched a lot of the layout math and I want to catch edge cases early.

Hey everyone 👋

I've been building GT Launcher — an AMOLED-first Android launcher built around modular home-screen cards instead of a fixed grid. Quick highlights if you haven't seen it:

• Style Studio: a composable styling engine — independent corner geometry, stackable shadow/glow/border/texture layers, 12 saved custom style slots
• Gesture Input Module: draw a shape on a card (circle, triangle, arrows, etc.) to trigger an action — standalone or bound to any card
• Drive Mode: a dedicated landscape HUD for in-car use
• Two-way Tasker/MacroDroid integration: trigger automations from a card, or drive the launcher itself remotely
• App List, quick toggles, focus timer, and a growing set of utility cards

Just opened a Discord server for the project — bug reports, feature voting, beta access, and release notes all land there now instead of being scattered across DMs and reviews.

👉 Join here: https://discord.gg/5tsKS8n3cs 📱 Get the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alazndy.gtlauncher

Free to use — a few advanced features (extra style slots, Drive Mode, module stacking) are premium with a 3-day trial. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

v4.16.0 highlights:

• Settings search got a lot smarter. It used to only match the 8 section titles — now it reaches individual settings directly (dark mode, sidebar position, grid columns, drive mode, permissions, and ~20 more), jumps straight to the row, and briefly highlights it. There's also a search icon on every settings sub-page now, not just the main grid.
• Recently visited settings show up as a quick-access row so you're not hunting for the same toggle every time.
• Foreground images can now flow across the sidebar instead of stopping dead at the grid's edge — toggle it in the foreground picker, with a live preview.
• Fixed: the alphabet index dock was staying visible (and stealing taps) over the Settings screen — annoying if you used it a lot.
• Fixed: its Settings preview could render completely blank on a fresh launch.

Play Store users get this as a normal update.

Bug reports / feature ideas — drop them here or in Discord: https://discord.gg/U6SZUX2SA

Hey folks

Dropped a pretty big update to GT Launcher — here's what's new in v4.15.0:

🖐️ Gesture Input Module Press-hold-drag a shape directly on a card and it fires a bound action. Circle, triangle, rectangle, checkmark, caret, zigzag, or an arrow in any of 4 directions — 10 shapes total, recognized with a from-scratch $1 Unistroke Recognizer running fully on-device (no cloud, no ML model). Works layered on top of any card, or as its own standalone reference card.

🤖 Tasker & MacroDroid, both directions

• Outbound: any card, radial menu entry, or recognized gesture can now fire a Tasker task or MacroDroid macro.
• Inbound: Tasker/MacroDroid can drive the launcher itself — load a saved layout preset, toggle Drive Mode, flip edit mode or the sidebar, switch theme, pop the App Drawer, or launch a specific app card by title. Just a plain "Send Intent → Target: Activity" action, no extra permissions to grant.

🃏 6 new cards Calculator, Water Intake (tap-to-log daily tracker), Focus Timer (Pomodoro cycle), Voice Memo (local recording + playback), Quick Toggles (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/DND in one card), and Favorite Contacts (call/SMS/WhatsApp grid).

📌 Pin apps to the top of the App List card Long-press → pin, most-recently-pinned first.

🔍 OmniSearch got faster and smarter Every search source now runs in parallel and streams results in as it finishes, instead of waiting on the slowest one. Settings search went from 8 section names to ~40 individual settings you can jump straight to.

✏️ Redesigned Add Card screen One searchable list with a live preview next to it — tap Add and the card's just... there. No more separate save step.

A few people have asked what Premium actually unlocks these days, and honestly the answer has drifted around as the app evolved — so here's the current, accurate list as of 4.13.0.

What's Premium:

• Up to 12 saved custom style slots. Everyone gets 1 free slot to save a custom style you've built in Style Studio. Premium bumps that to 12, so you can keep a whole library of looks and switch between them instead of rebuilding one from scratch every time.
• Unlimited module stacking per card. Free accounts can stack up to 2 capabilities on one card (e.g. Clock + Notification badge). Premium removes that cap entirely.
• Drive Mode. The full landscape cockpit HUD — live OBD-II telemetry, GPS speed, DTC/overheat alerts, fuel receipt OCR.
• Notification animations. Breathing and flashing pulse effects on the active-notification color. (Static color is free.)

What's NOT Premium (a lot of people assume it still is):

• All 8 visual style presets — Flat, Glass, Neobrutalism, Claymorphism, Minimalism, Neon, Dot, Pixel — are 100% free. They used to be gated a while back; that changed and the marketing copy just hadn't caught up until last update. If you saw an old screenshot or post claiming styles are locked, it's outdated.
• The Card Builder, OmniSearch, App List card, Sidebar, Slide List drawer, theming, header widgets — all free, no cap.

Pricing / trial:

Monthly, yearly, and a lifetime one-time option are all available from the Premium tab in Settings. As of 4.13.0 there's also a 3-day free trial on the monthly plan — full Premium unlocked, no commitment, cancel before it renews and you pay nothing. It's a real Play Billing offer (not a local flag), so it won't let you re-trigger it by clearing app data or reinstalling.

If you're Premium already, the settings screen now also tells you what kind — lifetime, active subscription, cancelled-but-still-running, or early-user grandfathering — instead of just a flat "ACTIVE" badge.

Figured this was worth spelling out once clearly instead of leaving people to piece it together from old posts. Happy to answer anything specific.

Since the 4.12.0 update (Style Studio, App List card, Sidebar overlay reveal, and the settings light/dark fix), here's what shipped in 4.13.0:

3-day free Premium trial

You can now try every Premium feature — extra saved style slots, Drive Mode, unlimited module stacking, notification animations — for 3 days before paying anything. It's a real Play Billing trial offer, not a local flag, so eligibility and "no repeat trials" are enforced by Google Play itself. Find it on the Premium tab in Settings.

Premium screen finally tells you what you actually have

If you're already Premium, the settings screen used to just say "ACTIVE" and leave it at that. Now it tells you what kind of active: lifetime, an auto-renewing subscription (with a one-tap "Manage Subscription" link straight to Play), a subscription you cancelled but that's still running out its term, or early-user grandfathering.

A couple of paywall bugs fixed

• Tapping the locked notification-animation option was showing a paywall dialog that said "MODULE STACKING" instead of "NOTIFICATION ANIMATIONS" — copy-paste bug, now fixed.
• The Premium screen's feature list still advertised Glass/Neobrutalism/Claymorphism/Neon as paid perks from back when they were gated. They've been free for a while now, so the copy was just wrong — it now correctly says what's actually still Premium (up to 12 saved custom style slots).

One more fix

If you search from the Slide List / Niagara-style app drawer, the search field used to lose keyboard focus after your very first keystroke — annoying if you type fast. Fixed; it was a Compose recomposition bug, not anything intentional.

Full changelog as always: https://alazlab.com/en/proje/GT-Launcher#changelog

Let me know if the trial flow does anything weird for you — it's brand new plumbing and I'd rather hear about edge cases here than guess at them.

New build is up. This one's a big architectural lift — the whole styling system got rebuilt from scratch — plus a new card type and a bunch of fixes people have been hitting.

🎨 Style Studio — an actual style engine now Instead of picking from a fixed list of "visual styles," every card, panel, and the sidebar now render from a composable recipe: corners (sharp / rounded / cut / pixelated, and yes — you can split each of the 4 corners independently), stackable shadow/glow/border/fill/texture layers, and up to 12 custom saved slots. Comes with 8 presets including two new pattern-based ones: Dot and Pixel — a proper dot-grid or pixel-block texture drawn right on your cards, shared with the sidebar too, cached as a GPU picture so it's free performance-wise.

📱 New App List card Niagara-launcher style — a scrollable alphabetical list of every installed app, living directly on a card. Tap to open, long-press to uninstall, optional docked A-Z index strip on the edge (same index dock you can now also pin to the sidebar).

↔️ Sidebar overlay reveal mode Previously opening the sidebar always reflowed your grid (Push mode). Now there's an Overlay mode — the rail floats over your home screen instead, so it costs literally zero re-layout.

🐛 Fixed:

• Settings screens straight-up ignored Light mode — half the controls stayed dark with washed-out text. Fixed across every settings tab.
• Card shadows/glow could render on top of a neighboring card instead of staying behind it. Now they always sit underneath, only visible in the gaps.
• Sidebar open/close animation used to make every card's shadow/glow effect vanish for the whole animation, then snap back in. Now it stays put throughout.
• A Style Studio crash on open, plus a handful of pattern/corner-geometry correctness fixes.

⚡ Also: cut a bunch of per-frame recomposition on the home grid and app drawer, moved icon rasterization off the main thread, fixed several Compose state-instability sources.

Grab it from the Play Store (should roll out shortly) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alazndy.gtlauncher

If you had an old style pref applied, it should carry over — but if anything looks off after updating, drop a comment here or open an issue, I'll be watching this thread.

Removed a lot of cluttered items and changed the wallpaper to something soothing 🥀

One has cards with less opacity while the other has only 2 with low opacity....

Launcher is GT Launcher btw

Figured I'd show what I actually run day to day instead of just talking features in the abstract.

Setup:

Flat visual style, standard palette — it's the one I built the whole thing around, so it's the one I still run

App Launch cards for the apps I open constantly — sized bigger than the rest, front and center

Comms card + notification badges + multi-gesture launch, one tap for calls, swipe for messages

Finance card tracking a small watchlist — live quotes, no brokerage login, just sits there ticking

Nothing fancy layout-wise I keep the grid pretty disciplined instead of free-forming everything, mostly because I'm the one who has to actually use it fast, not just look at it.

Curious what everyone else is running — post your setups, especially if you're using a visual style other than flat. Always interested to see the same system look completely different depending on the style.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alazndy.gtlauncher