Best Android Home Screen Layouts to Make Better Use of Your Phone

Best Android Home Screen Layouts to Make Better Use of Your Phone
Best Android Home Screen Layouts to Make Better Use of Your Phone

Have you got bored using the same Android Home screen for days? Then Android offers you the power to customize the Home screen up to any extent. There are many different launchers, icon packs, and screen savers that provide you with the ability to completely change. We have rounded up some Android Home screen setups that you can use after grabbing the resources provided.

Android home screen setups are a set of customizations done to get a unique look and feel, that can be based on any theme like just black (AMOLED) setup, Outrun setup, Black and White setup or Minimalist setup. If you can think of it you can make a home screen that way.

Few apps you need to install based on the setup you choose from because setups sometimes have special functionality and unique layouts these can be launchers, widgets or navigation bars so don’t forget to check android customization apps for the full list.

Best Android Home Screen Layouts to Make Better Use of Your Phone

1. AIO Launcher

AIO Launcher: information-dense, graphics-light
AIO Launcher: information-dense, graphics-light

If you’re not a fan of the icon-heavy look of traditional home screens, AIO Launcher takes a different approach, showing you tons of information on one scrollable page.

You’ll see one block with your most recently used apps, one with recent calls and texts, one with CPU and RAM usage, and others with your email, calendar, and even stock prices. It’s useful, but text-heavy, which means it can be a bit harder to see everything at a glance.

But that also means it won’t be quite as enticing, allowing you to cut back on screen time more easily.

AIO is free to download and use, but the full version offers themes, icon customization, multiple widgets, and a whole bunch of other features for $3.

If you want something even more minimal, ap15 is an alternative that eschews icons for a “word cloud” of apps on your home screen.

2. Niagra Launcher

Niagra Launcher: simple, minimal, and one-handed
Niagra Launcher: simple, minimal, and one-handed

Imagine if your home screen were gone entirely, replaced with an alphabetical app drawer you could navigate with one hand. That’s Niagra.

You can select a few of your apps as “favourites” that show up at the top, but to access any others, tap the right side of the screen and drag them down to scroll through your list of apps. (You can search, too, but in my experience, scrolling through the alphabet works just as fast, if not faster.)

Apart from a cool waterfall effect and a few colour customizations in the settings, Niagra is visually minimal: what you see is what you get, and it does its job gracefully.

The real advantage to this approach is that you can use the entire home screen one-handed, without having to stretch across today’s giant screens to access different apps or features.

If you aren’t a fan of Niagra’s layout—or you have so many apps that search becomes more useful than scrolling—you might prefer KISS Launcher, which has a similar minimal feel but focuses more on searching through your apps, contacts, and the web via one unified bar.

3. Joker Raining Street

Joker Raining Street
Joker Raining Street

A minimalist, powerful yet dynamic Android Home screen setup with music controls. The rain effect in the background brings animation to the static display using Rainpaper for Rain Effect. The Minty Icon pack looks fantastic at the bottom of the display. You can open the app drawer by swiping up from the bottom.

Music lovers can control music from the widget and can see the completion status in a small circle ring around the play/pause button. Joker on a street wallpaper is downloaded from the Wallpsy app.

4. Black and White Tesla

Black and White Tesla
Black and White Tesla

Yes, you read it right. We have tested a black and white Tesla wallpaper to bring a subtle yet crafty Android Home screen. The beautiful Minimal 153 widget from Mini-ism KWGT is the main attraction of this layout. Another Minimal 049 widget at the bottom features a calendar, search bar, and app drawer ‘view more’ button at the bottom.

The icons from Minty as in the previous setup is placed in the center for a more attractive look.

You can easily create this setup using the wallpaper from the WallsPy app.

5. Kustom Live Wallpaper (KLWP)

Kustom Live Wallpaper (KLWP): build your own home screen from scratch
Kustom Live Wallpaper (KLWP): build your own home screen from scratch

If none of the above launchers appeals to you but you still want something truly unique, you might be a prime candidate for Kustom Live Wallpaper, also known as KLWP in the Play Store. KLWP isn’t actually a launcher—it’s a live wallpaper you can put under any other launcher, such as Nova. But instead of acting as mere animated background, KLWP lets you create a home screen from the ground up with widget-like blocks of data, cool animations, and—if you’re a particularly savvy user—a programming language that’ll let you create just about anything.

KLWP isn’t for the faint of heart, but if other launchers aren’t suiting your needs, it’ll let you make something uniquely yours. And if you’re worried about battery life, fear not—many users find it to be quite battery-friendly, as long as you don’t tinker with it too often.

If KLWP is too intense and the learning curve too steep, Lightning Launcher is a slightly simpler (but still very customizable) alternative.

6. Launcher 10

Launcher 10
Launcher 10

Remember Windows Phone—the operating system so few people used it became a bit of a punchline? It actually had a lot of cool stuff going for it, and while it’s officially dead now (RIP), you can get a similar home screen experience on Android with Launcher 10. And don’t worry—it doesn’t come with Internet Explorer.

The app replaces the small icons with large, squared-off tiles that you can arrange however you like, customizing the size, colour, transparency, and “live” information that appears on each.

It’s a good alternative to Android’s traditional display since it’ll preview your latest email or text message right on the home screen, or make your most-used app icons bigger so they’re easier to tap. It’s free to download, but you’ll need to pony up $7 for Live Tiles functionality.

If you like the idea of a Windows-style home screen, but Launcher 10 isn’t doing it for you, you might try Launcher 8. It’s been around much longer and is more customizable, but it has lately had some annoying bugs that seem to have affected a lot of users (including myself).

Square Home 3 is also popular, albeit slightly less Windows-like.

Anton Venter

Anton covered Google technology for over four years from the the city of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has reviewed mobiles and Android devices for a number of local blogs and magazines; Anton loves researching and numbers.

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