This Android launcher reminds me of Windows Phone in the best way possible

I have a confession to do: I was not a fan of Android phone at first. I was not an iPhone enthusiast either. Instead, I was a Windows Phone disciple in its own right. I loved the metro user interface, with a fresh interface and based on tiles that jumped on an OLED screen. I liked the interface and the cameras so much that I bought a Lumia 1020 and a Lumia 950.

I have known Android launchers who have imitated this Windows Phone look for years now, and have briefly stretched with them at the time. But my Windows Phone itching is stronger than ever, and I found two launchers who got closer to scratch it. After watching Square Home and Launcher 10 on my pixel phone (sacrilege, I know), I finally settled on the first.

The two launchers do an excellent job to imitate the Windows Phone experience from a visual perspective. I would give the advantage to launcher 10 for its application drawer design in particular, but I chose At home For several reasons.

The greatest reason may be that living tiles are available for free here, while launcher 10 requires payment to unlock them. For uninitiated tiles, live tiles were Microsoft’s response to Widgets on Android, offering square or rectangular tiles that constantly display updates and other information. For example, you can see missed calls in phone tiles, notifications in the Facebook tile and your favorite photos in the photos.

Square Home mainly fills the live tiles with information from your notifications, and this obviously requires your permission. It is nevertheless a smart way to give life to these tiles, and you will get information such as Gmail extracts, calendar entries, etc. I also like the live multimedia widget that appears, which is derived from the multimedia widget in the notification shade. And yes, you can really interact with media checks. In another neat touch, the reversal tiles of the old platform are also there, showing you different information nuggets. You can also make these tiles transparent to show your wallpaper, a bit like the subsequent versions of the Microsoft platform. So I didn’t really feel that I was missing largely.

The launcher also won me with its tile adjustments. Microsoft has enabled Windows Phone users to adjust the size of these tiles, passing the regular size to a quarter -size size. Square Home allows you to intuitively adjust the size of a tile by preaching the tile for a long time, a bit like Windows Phone itself (and with some additional options also). Launcher 10 offers granular size adjustments with default cursors, but it is not as intuitive and familiar if you are a Windows Phone fan like me. Fortunately, you can dig a little deeper in Square Home if you also want more detailed adjustments.

I also appreciate the very reasonable payment options of Square Home. You can choose to pay $ 1 per year or make a single payment of $ 6. I know that many companies have abandoned occasional purchases due to greed Financial reasons, but I am happy to see this option here. By saying, the team does not adequately transmit the advantages of paying the premium on its list of websites or play stores. However, it seems that the parameters with green icons are paid additions. These include advanced animations, multimedia controller features, many gestures and your police choice.

Another point in favor of Square Home is its nature without advertising. There is absolutely nothing wrong with offering an application supported by advertising, and launcher 10 is very limited in its approach (apparently restricted on the menu of parameters, while allowing you to pay to get rid of it), but it is pleasant to have an experience without advertising outside the box.

The list of Square Home features does not stop here. It offers a customizable application drawer, a color theme based on wallpaper, support for tablets and foldable phones and support for private space. The team recently updated the application to also solve problems with widgets in a user interface 7, so that developers are still actively repairing things after all this time.

I can think of a few small improvement areas for the square house, such as improving the handling of third -party widgets and more colors of predefined tiles. But these are relatively insignificant list of wishes, and we certainly have a complete experience.

Even if the Windows Phone ship sailed a long time ago, I am happy to see that the community has picked up the stick and sprinted with it. I am definitely partial at the square house, but these two launchers are excellent ways to effectively imitate this experience. Now, about Microsoft creating its own Windows Phone launcher for Android.