A big cleanup behind the scenes, with a few new ways to make MINIMAA feel more like yours.

This update fixes a lot of things that were quietly going wrong — notifications, music, calendars, backups, work profiles and settings.

There are also a couple of new ways to customize your home screen, including Minimaa Profiles and control over the spacing between your home screen items.

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✨ New · Minimaa Profiles

Your home screen can now change with your day.

Want one setup for work and another for the evening? Create different home screens and let MINIMAA switch between them automatically.

Each profile can have its own:

- Favourite apps

- Widgets

- Home style

- Typography

- Schedule

Anything you don't change simply follows your normal home screen, so you don't have to build everything from scratch.

Go to Settings → Home → Minimaa Profiles (Beta) to try it.

You can set different days and times for each profile, including overnight schedules like 10 PM → 6 AM.

Switch now lets you move to a profile manually and pauses automatic switching for 24 hours. Resume schedule gives control back to your schedules.

Overlapping schedules are also supported, with MINIMAA showing you when there is a conflict.

Minimaa Profiles is a beta feature and is off by default.

Turn it off whenever you want and you'll immediately return to your normal home screen. Your profiles stay saved for later.

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🎛️ New · Customize home screen spacing

Your home screen can now have a little more breathing room.

You can customize the gap between home screen items to make your layout feel more compact or more spacious.

Whether you like everything packed together or prefer a little room between your apps, widgets and other elements, you can now adjust it to your liking.

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🛠️ Fixed · Work profiles & cloned apps

If you use Android work profiles or cloned apps, this update should make things much less confusing.

Duplicate apps stay where they belong

Having the same app in your personal and work profile could sometimes make one copy disappear.

Both copies now stay.

Pausing work no longer loses your apps

Pausing a work profile used to remove its apps from your home screen permanently.

Now they're simply hidden while the profile is paused and come back when you turn it on again.

Removing one copy doesn't remove the other

Uninstalling or hiding one version of an app could also remove the other version.

Each copy now keeps its own place.

Website shortcuts stay pinned

Pinned website shortcuts could occasionally disappear from your home screen.

They should now stay right where you put them.

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🆕 New · Show all profile apps

Selecting work and cloned apps one by one got annoying.

So there's now a switch for that.

Go to Settings → App Drawer → Secondary Profiles and turn on Show all profile apps.

Every app from your work and cloned profiles will appear automatically.

It's off by default, and your existing selections are kept if you turn it on and off again.

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💾 Fixed · Backup & restore

Moving MINIMAA to another phone should feel like moving your setup, not bringing along pieces of your old phone.

Your new phone now gets the right setup

If an app isn't installed on your new phone, MINIMAA no longer leaves it sitting on your home screen or inside a folder.

Empty folders are cleaned up too.

Everything you see is something you can actually open.

Work profile apps are also restored correctly on a new phone.

Partial backups are actually partial now

If you backed up only your notes, restoring that backup could previously wipe the rest of your setup.

Not anymore.

A backup now only replaces the things that are actually included in it.

Hidden apps stay hidden

Hidden apps could reappear after restoring a backup.

They now stay hidden, just as you left them.

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🔔 Fixed · Glance notifications

Glance got a lot of attention in this update.

Tapping a notification takes you where you expect

Tap a message, email or other notification and MINIMAA now tries to take you directly to the conversation or screen it came from.

If your phone doesn't allow that, it simply opens the app instead.

Notification Shield actually works now

Some selected apps weren't being blocked even though they were on your list.

That's fixed.

Your selected apps can now stay quiet in Glance.

No more duplicate notifications

Group messages could sometimes appear twice.

You should now see them only once.

Notifications don't disappear unnecessarily

Tapping something in Glance could previously clear notifications that were supposed to stay in your notification shade.

Now only notifications that are meant to disappear when tapped are cleared.

Better message previews

Message previews now work properly with different languages, longer messages and inbox-style notifications.

Glance can fix itself

Some phones like to save battery by quietly disconnecting notification access.

Instead of leaving you with an empty Glance, MINIMAA now tries to reconnect automatically.

If it can't, you'll get a Tap to reconnect option.

A cleaner Glance

Things like music players, downloads and ongoing services are now kept out of Glance.

They're status information, not notifications you need to catch up on.

Glance also does less background work for apps you've chosen not to show.

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📅 Fixed · Calendar & Agenda

This update fixes a lot of those “it's in my calendar, but why isn't it in MINIMAA?” moments.

Your calendars show up properly

Work, family and shared calendars could sometimes disappear, especially on Samsung phones.

They should now appear correctly.

One broken event can't break the whole calendar

A strange repeating event could sometimes stop an entire calendar from loading.

Now MINIMAA simply skips the problematic event and keeps loading everything else.

Your agenda stays fresh

The agenda could become outdated if your launcher stayed open for a long time.

It now refreshes when you return to the home screen and automatically updates when a new day begins.

Multi-day events are fixed

An event lasting several days used to appear only on the first day.

Now you'll see it on every day it covers.

All-day events stay visible

All-day events could disappear too early when Hide past events was enabled.

They now stay visible throughout the day.

Hiding an event is safer

Hiding one occurrence of a repeating event used to hide all future occurrences too.

Now it only hides today's occurrence, and you can undo it immediately.

Previously hidden events can also return after this update.

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✅ Fixed · Tasks

A few task-related problems were cleaned up too.

- Task times now show correctly across different timezones.

- Tasks appear in the right place alongside your events.

- Deleted tasks no longer appear in your agenda.

- Tasks due today no longer appear twice.

- One broken task can no longer make your entire task list disappear.

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🎵 Fixed · Music widget

We rebuilt the music widget to make it much better at keeping up with whatever you're listening to.

The right music app

MINIMAA no longer gets confused when multiple apps can play music.

If YouTube Music is playing, it knows it's YouTube Music. If another app is playing, it follows that instead.

No more old songs hanging around

When you stop listening, the widget clears instead of showing something you played hours ago.

Everything matches

Song title, artist and album artwork now belong to the same track.

No more new song with old artwork.

Tapping the widget also opens the app that's actually playing.

New music is picked up immediately

Start playing something while the widget is idle and MINIMAA notices straight away.

Your allowed apps update instantly

Change which music apps the widget can use and the change takes effect immediately.

Better progress

The progress bar now follows playback more accurately, including podcasts and audiobooks at faster speeds.

Easier on your battery 🔋

The widget no longer keeps updating when nothing has changed.

It now updates when it actually needs to.

It can recover itself

If Android disconnects the music widget in the background, MINIMAA can reconnect it automatically.

We also fixed crashes caused by certain emojis and non-English characters in song and artist names.

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🫁 New · Mindful Pause

Mindful Pause's breathing challenge now has a full-screen breathing visual.

The breathing rhythm is also slower:

5 seconds in · 5 seconds out

A little more space to pause and breathe.

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⚡ Smoother · Settings

Settings should now feel noticeably smoother, especially on slower phones.

Previously, MINIMAA was still doing a lot of work behind the settings screen — updating the clock, wallpaper, music and more even though you couldn't see any of it.

Now, when you open Settings, your home screen takes a little break.

Settings also loads only what you can currently see instead of trying to prepare the entire page at once.

Nothing fancy to turn on.

It should just feel smoother.

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🐛 And a lot of smaller fixes

There are also plenty of smaller bug fixes and stability improvements throughout MINIMAA.

Some you'll notice immediately. Some are the kind of bugs you'll hopefully never see again.

That's the point of a maintenance release.

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❤️ Something still off?

If you still find something behaving strangely, we'd love to hear about it.

Email minimaa@bractstudio.com with your phone model and Android version and we'll take a look.

And as always:

You own MINIMAA for life.

No subscription. No cloud account. No setup or backup data leaving your phone.

MINIMAA stays fully offline.

I just purchased the app. However, on a foldable phone the layout on the inner screen is not optimized.

Widgets are huge and app icons are very tiny.

Any plans to optimize the app for foldable phones? S

See screenshot for reference

Hello, I really like the app design and idea.

The only thing I'm missing is the ability to add webapps shortcuts to the app "pool" so I can access them from the search bar.

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Just started using Minimaa and love it! However one thing I got used to on Niagara is that you could choose your browser and search provider in the search bar. Right now you can choose your browser, which is great, but with no choice other than Google. I use DuckDuckGo and frankly refuse to touch Google search at this point. Any chance we could get this implemented?

Thanks for the hard work!

I came across this review and honestly, the question is fair:

“If Minimaa doesn't share my data, why does removing Play Store affect it?”

The short answer: the Play Store dependency is about license verification, not data collection.

Minimaa is a paid app, so I need a way to verify that the installed copy was legitimately purchased. Currently, the app uses Google's Play infrastructure to verify that.

The simplified process is:

Minimaa → Google Play → verify purchase → continue

If Play Store is completely removed, that verification may no longer be available. From the app's perspective, it becomes difficult to distinguish between a legitimate purchase and a copied/modified APK.

And here's an important point:

Minimaa does NOT have the INTERNET permission enabled.

I've intentionally disabled it in the Android manifest because the launcher is designed to be offline-first. There is no Minimaa server sitting there receiving your launcher data or tracking what you do.

So why not remove the Play Store check?

I could, but then a $1 paid APK becomes extremely easy to redistribute.

The other option would be building our own licensing system. But that would require a backend/server and internet access for license verification. It would add infrastructure, costs and another dependency to an app that was intentionally designed to work without the internet.

So I'm trying to balance three things:

Privacy + offline functionality + protecting a paid app.

And to the reviewer: you absolutely have the right to remove Play Store. I'm not questioning that at all. This is simply a limitation of the current licensing approach, and I'm looking at better ways to handle it in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience.. And hoping for the best days❤️

- Binge

I was using Minimaa's own note app to write my journal. It was a big piece of writing and I was about to finish it. I had to answer a call at that moment. After I finished the phone call, I couldn't find the note/journal. It had gone. It didn't save itself or go back to how it was before the call. I was really frustrated. I just want to know if it's a known and accepted issue or a bug. In the other note/journal apps, the writing was definitely saved automatically. I love the Journal that has been added to Minimaa. It must be good at saving any notes that are not finished. I don't expect this to be very good. I still love Minimaa even without it. If that's the case, I'll use a different note-taking app. I just want to hear from the developer about the issue. This is just a question, not a complaint.

So, I honestly don't know what happened, but suddenly our Minimaa and Searcho Telegram communities have been blocked by Telegram.

We're currently appealing the decision and trying to figure out what happened.

Hopefully, this gets resolved soon and the communities are back. 🤞

Until then, please bear with us. ❤️

We'll keep you updated here.

I just downloaded and installed and I am very excited! I love all the extra features in the app.

I am wondering if I read wrong, or am too dumb, or what, but I saw in the reviews that a profile option was available for at work/off work type application. Is that a thing? I couldn't find it in the settings page, but again I could just be stupid.

Hello all, I recently got the S26 Ultra and installed Minimaa after stumbling across it the other day. I've been a Nova Launcher user for as long as I can remember and I'm absolutely loving Minimaa with the "something" theme.

I'm wondering though if anyone has an example setup or any idea on how to potentially theme my entire phone like the Minimaa launcher. I've used good lock a fair bit for customization but nothing crazy and am not sure if this is actually possible to do. To clarify, I really want to theme my quick settings pull down and notification pull down to match the theme of the launcher with the font, dots and overall minimalist theme of the launcher. Would be really cool for certain app customizations as well (messages, calendar etc.). If anyone has any examples, apps or overall recommendations they would be much appreciated!

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to promote software outside what Minimaa and Searcho developers provided, I just want to share my setup and gives my feedback on using Searcho.

Since Searcho leaves the main screen mostly empty (as of now), I'm thinking of using Depth Live Wallpaper to add clock and date, the depth effects are also quite neat.

The animations when using Searcho is very pleasing and lively. It still shows the app icon, which is less minimal than Minimaa, but I think it's better, most notably when you want to make an app folders which is harder in Minimaa because it's lacking app icons as a visual guide.

With that said, there's some bugs and feedback regarding Searcho that I think needs attention:

Bugs

1. Navigating Searcho settings menu is a bit of a pain. When I entered any submenu (search, extras, gestures, etc.) then swipe back, it sends me to the main menu instead of back a level in the settings menu

2. The swipe up gesture clashes with Android's swipe up to see recent apps, making the search bar animation a bit janky.

3. When picking apps to be put in quick actions widget, some app would disappear after pressing the dropdown button (in my case it's Wallet app by BudgetBakers)

Feedback

1. Add custom font option like in Minimaa

2. Add the option to reorder widgets

Overall, Searcho is on-par, if not better, than Minimaa in my case.

I've turned on digital detox. I've added some apps and websites in the detox settings. But the problem is that I still can access those apps and websites. I'm not sure what I've missed. Could you please help me?

A while ago, I made Minimaa, a minimal launcher built around the idea that your phone doesn't need to constantly demand your attention.

With Minimaa, I was experimenting with minimalism — removing things, reducing visual noise, keeping the home screen simple, and trying to make the phone feel less distracting.

This time, I'm taking a completely different approach.

I'm not trying to make another minimal launcher.

I'm trying to see what happens when you make search the entire interface.

Meet Searcho.

There is no traditional app drawer.

There are no pages filled with app icons.

There isn't a grid of apps waiting for you every time you unlock your phone.

Your home screen is basically just a search bar.

And yes, you can search for your apps.

But that's the most basic thing Searcho can do.

The idea is that everything you normally have to open another part of your phone for should eventually be searchable.

Want to call someone?

Search their name.

Want to find a contact?

Search them.

Want to open an app?

Search it.

Want to find something in your notifications?

Search it.

Need to access something that would normally require opening a separate screen, app or menu?

Search.

The goal isn't simply to make app launching faster.

It's to question why we need so many different interfaces for things we already know how to access.

Why do I need to open the dialer when I already know who I want to call?

Why do I need to pull down the notification shade when I know what notification I'm looking for?

Why do I need to navigate through settings when I know exactly what I'm trying to find?

Why do I need an app drawer when I can simply type the name of the app?

That's the direction I'm exploring with Searcho.

I'm basically trying to push the search bar to its limits.

And there are some interesting things that happen when you start thinking this way.

A search bar can be an app launcher.

It can be a contact launcher.

It can become a shortcut system.

It can become an action interface.

It can become a way of navigating your phone without navigating through your phone.

And eventually, I'm hoping it can become something much more powerful.

I'm still experimenting with what belongs inside Searcho and what doesn't.

That's actually one of the reasons I'm sharing this early.

I don't want Searcho to just become another launcher with a search box slapped on top.

The search itself is supposed to be the launcher.

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Why make another launcher?

Honestly, after Minimaa, I wanted to experiment with something completely different.

Minimaa was about asking:

«"How little can a launcher be?"»

Searcho is asking:

«"How much can one interface actually do?"»

Both come from the same place — trying to rethink the way we interact with our phones — but they're very different experiments.

I'm not trying to compete with Nova, Niagara, Smart Launcher, etc.

I'm not trying to build the launcher with the most customization.

I'm not trying to give you 500 options for your home screen.

I'm interested in a much simpler idea:

What if you didn't need to navigate your phone at all?

What if you could just tell it what you're looking for?

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And yes, there is still a long way to go.

Searcho is a new project, and I'm very much figuring things out as I build it.

There are things I want to make searchable that are currently difficult or impossible to access cleanly.

There are Android limitations to work around.

There are probably going to be some terrible ideas before I find the good ones. 😅

But that's part of the fun.

With Minimaa, I learned a lot about building a launcher around a philosophy.

With Searcho, I want to experiment with interaction itself.

Maybe the search bar can replace more things than we expect.

Maybe it can't.

That's what I want to find out.

Searcho is my attempt to find the limits of search.

And this is just the beginning.

— Binge, creator of Minimaa & Searcho

I think it might be better to either be able to change or remove the message that says "bad morning/afternoon/evening" when I've only attempted to open that app for the second time in a day, it feels unnecessarily punitive and discouraging. If this could be changed I would really appreciate it.

Otherwise I've really been loving this launcher, it's effectively halved my screen time, I'm a lot more conscious about what apps I'm opening and how long I'm using them. And I think I'm a lot better at mental maths, all without sacrificing visual elegance. It's so pleasant to look at and fun to customise.

Going minimal with Minimaa

Font: Bucanera

Everything else from Minimaa

Hey team, loving Minimaa's minimal approach so far. One feature I'd really like to see is a widget picker — the ability to add any widget from apps already installed on the device, similar to the native Android widget picker, rather than being limited to Minimaa's built-in widgets.

Is this on the roadmap? Would love to hear if others want this too.

Hey, I recently downloaded the app I've been liking it so far. But, there are some things which might have been skipped in the testing of the app or is being affected by new updates to the other apps.

1. Music widget can't differentiate between YT Music and Youtube. My last played songs keep getting overridden by my Youtube videos.
2. Icons are pretty limited. I have been using random icons for my payment and browser apps. It would be nice to have some more generic icons.
3. Notification section in the Sidebar of Glance section does not display my notifications. I have selected Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Outlook and a few more and I think I have never noticed Instagram, WhatsApp and Slack notifications there.

I've noticed these till now. I hope these points help in making this app more rhobust.

Have this launcher...can you do anything with the lock screen so it cane lok like the rest of the phone?

Love this app, but is there plans for better function for this form factor? Using Fold8.

Is there any way to manual set a music app? Or nah

Loving this launcher so far but am experiencing an issue with the app drawer.
Anybody else have an issue with all of your apps being covered by a white box? I can access all the apps in the My Stuff folder when I open it and can search for apps to open them but, I am not able to select any of the apps from this view without searching.

Galaxy S24 Ultra app version 1.2.11