Start again, with less.
A calm Android home screen that turns your phone from a habit back into a tool.
Your apps answer to you, not the other way round. RE*start clears the first screen of everything that competes for your attention and leaves a quiet, considered surface you finish yourself: the type, the colours, the clock, the order. Fewer things, chosen well; a home screen that carries your taste, not the noise of every app on it.
- Names, not icons: up to 8 apps on the home screen, by name. No coloured icons, no badges; you open the phone and go where you meant to.
- Search first: two or three letters are enough, and a typo is forgiven; if no app matches it looks in files, then contacts. You find instead of browsing, and what you type stays on the device.
- A drawer with categories: everything else in groups, from your own tags or from what each app says it is. Straight to the right shelf instead of a long list.
- Swiss layout, your colours: the grid, hairline rules and clear headings come from Swiss typography; its red does not. Colour is kept quiet on purpose, so the screen never calls for you like a slot machine, and every colour from the background to the clock is yours to set.
- A screen that looks like you: four clock styles (Classic, Swiss, Rings, One line) with a live preview while you set them, your font on every screen, widgets that stay where you put them on a grid. Same app, a different screen in every hand.
- Notes and to-dos: written in the app, sorted by date and importance, the important ones under the clock with a count of what is open or overdue. What you meant to do is on the screen you open most, not in another app.
- Gestures you can trust: one action per swipe direction, however far you swipe; draw a circle, a four-sided figure or a triangle in one stroke to start what you choose, and try any gesture on a pad first. Fewer missed swipes, more done without looking for an icon.
- Settings where you expect them: seven sections by what they affect: Features, Look & Feel, Gestures, Home Screen Apps, Hidden Apps, Notes, Advanced. 21 languages. You find what you look for.
- Backups behind a password: every backup file is encrypted with your password, and you choose what goes in: settings, home screen and gestures, drawer, shortcuts, notes, widget layout, font. Restoring takes the parts you tick and merges the notes; an automatic backup can go to a folder of your choice, and a copy is kept before every update. A new phone or a reinstall gets your setup back, and nobody else can read it.
- Quiet: no ads, no analytics, no crash uploads, no accounts. The only request it makes on its own is the weather, with the location rounded to about 1 km; dependencies audited with LifeLine. A home screen that does not sell your attention. Details in SECURITY.md.
APK only for now. App store releases are coming soon.
Download the APK from the latest release and open it on the phone. Then make RE*start your home app; on most phones: Settings → Apps → Default apps → Home app.
./gradlew assembleProdDebug builds a debug APK; signed releases are described in
CONTRIBUTING.md. Bugs and ideas go to issues or pull requests; security
problems through SECURITY.md. Changes are listed in CHANGELOG.md.
GPL-3.0. RE*start descends from Olauncher → OlauncherCF → mLauncher; the 47 people behind that code are named in FOUNDATION.md.
RE*maker // SEU-Emekulas