RIP in peace Windows Phone 10. Still the best home screen setup ever.
There’s a few android launchers that emulate the metro ui. I use the Square Home one and I have no complaints.
I’ve got Launcher 10. It’s my favorite of the WP10 likes I’ve seen and used. And I’ve used a ton lol
If I try it out and don’t like it, will my Nova Launcher screen go back to how it is now, or will I need to set it all up again?
If you dive into Nova’s settings, you should be able to make a backup of your setup. Should just be able to restore your backup. That said, I don’t use Nova much to confirm but that should be how it works
Edit: Dur I’m dumb. If you don’t uninstall Nova, you can just swap between launchers because they’re just apps. No backup needed as long as Nova doesn’t get uninstalled
Say what you will about Microsoft, lemmya, but Windows Phone 10 had great performance and battery life. It’s a shame that it was nuked because MS couldn’t being themselves to go all the way on the Android bridge.
I’m a mobile developer and back around 2011 I was hoping like hell that Windows Phone would make it big. When you look at Xcode (for iOS), Eclipse (for Android and Blackberry) and MS Visual Studio (for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone) for mobile development, there was absolutely no comparison - it was Visual Studio all the fucking way. But Microsoft just decided to completely shit the bed and give up on mobile altogether. I still don’t get it.
Around that time WebOS (under Palm) had the Mojo SDK, it was pretty slick.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about WebOS but I never got the chance to try it out.
I loved it, it’s a shame that phone failed to find it’s market. Luckily Matias Duarte eventually incorporated the best parts into android. Swipe navigation is almost identical to webos
They also messed up Nokia before killing Windows Phone. Nokia’s Symbian used to be a serious competition to android.
And MeeGo as well, which was a more modern base and even better UX than Windows Mobile in my opinion.
Symbian was a fantastic OS, but it never competed with Android in any meaningful way. Nokia was already circling the drain when Microsoft bought them and first Windows phones (Lumias) were fucking awesome. And then fucking moron Nadella killed Windows Phone.
The Windows Lumina phone was a battery-draining buggy version with a smaller screen than the Linux version N9, When they turned that into Windows (Lumina 800), they had to use a smaller screen and less memory as Windows couldn’t handle the hardware as MeeGo could.
N9 was perfect in every way except that it was abandoned. I miss that phone every day I use Android
Yet, that is the real Linux phone killer move by the former, Microsoft CEO for Nokia. Also the move that killed Nokia phones.
When Microsoft bought Nokia, Steve Balmer (ex-Microsoft) was at Nokia helm. His work with Nokia was so much in the interest of Microsoft that he was rewarded with head chair of Microsoft not much time later.
You mean Elop? Ballmer was MS CEO when MS bought Nokia, but they were doing fairly well in the beginning. Fucking moron Nadella took over and killed Windows mobile. Despite publically admitting later that it was a mistake, he’s still a fucking moron.
Nokia’s Symbian was shit and you’re the only person I’ve ever heard saying anything positive about it. To be a serious competitor to Android or IOS you need to have as much apps on the store and Symbian had very few.
I am saying that it was probably sabotaged by Microsoft leaning leadership at Nokia.
Also, despite being Linux core, Android itself was shit in the beginning. Gingerbread (G) was the first edition that won favour with buyers. Hardly any takers of android for its first six versions (A to F). Not even the techy nerds were buying Eclairs.
Around 20 years ago, iOS used to outclass everything by a big margin. Android, Nokia/Symbian, RIM, etc were closer to each other than to Apple. And now …
As of 2024, fresh competition to android is needed.
You can still get it with android launchers. Was toying with them the other day. Launcher 10 I believe is pretty close.
I actually use Launcher 10. I love it minus the weird glitch where the letter selector from the all apps list occasionally not working. Best Android Launcher around
Yes, it was a shame, and it only died mainlydue to the lack of available apps in the store. MS took too long to release it with Android and iOS already well established in the market… It was also the OS that resisted the longest in the Pwn2Own Hacking Contest in these years. While Android and iOS went down in less than a minute, before the hackers could access the data, on WindowsPhone, after half an hour they could only access the cookies.
Microsoft fucked up in the smartphone market so many different ways. The misunderstood the UX paradigms that would work, refused to change when Apple had obviously stolen their lunch money, stayed the bad course they were on when Android stole Apple’s lunch money and then didn’t even notice it has slammed Microsoft into some lockers because that’s how little windows phone mattered. By the time Microsoft did like… Actual good market research and focus testing to build an actual good mobile os (maximally ironically based on their Zune UX which had failed previously because Microsoft was infinitely too slow to the mobile audio market) it was exactly as you said. The perfect mobile OS just 5 years too late to matter. More than anything what they needed to do was prove the apps you actually needed were present on their store and pay OEMs money to make windows phones to establish market share to make up for having a lower count of apps. They failed to do so. Now their actually genuinely brilliant mobile os only exists as a series of android apps that no one really gives a shit about.
Honestly windows phone was sabotaged by both 3rd party developers who refused to port their apps to the platform, despite how easy it became AND did things like kill their own APIs to stop other developers from developing ports themselves, as well as by Google by not allowing their services on the platform.
The hardware was honestly top notch, even compared to my current S21 ultra. They were fairly pro consumer, having removable batteries, SD card slots and a 3.5mm jack right up until the end, even after the other big manufacturers removed them. And after the major update (the WP 8.1 update iirc) the software was really nice, intutive and pretty. I miss arranging and resising tiles, I miss having my pictures or album artworks showing up on the homescreen and I still use the Microsoft launcher on android to get the app drawer like I had on my WP.
Windows Phone was mostly sabotaged by first-party developers. Microsoft has a history of abandoning their mobile phone OSes after very short periods of time and nobody trusted them not to do it again. As a result few app developers bought into the ecosystem and smartphone enthusiasts told their friends not to get Windows phones, causing modest sales, causing Microsoft to immediately drop the platform.
As everyone expected them to.
can’t get an windows 10 emulator for android?
You can use launcher10 or any other launcher that looks like windows phone home screen.
That’s the launcher I use. It’s the best available from what I can find
Different people have different tastes. I use Trebuchet 8. But person I replied to was asking about Windown Phone experience on android.
What is Trebuchet 8? I didn’t see it in the play store for my Galaxy Flip 4.
Best I can find is it’s pre coupled with lineage is and you can extract it from the OS or some such but beyond that I’m lost
I was always shocked how smooth windows phone was. This system had potential but well.
haha apple bad amirite
I should really switch to Android
I personally don’t need that feature to be honest…
You personally don’t need a phone either.
Fuckin’ bollocks.
the point is that people should have the option even if you personally don’t need it
Android: “Check out all these options. You can customise it just as you’d like”
Apple: “Check it out! This is the best user interface ever. No need for customisation”
Counterpoint: green bubbles.
Counter counterpoint: no one cares what color the bubbles are, except the person reading em. Sounds like an iOS problem 😉
But the green ones aren’t ripe yet.
counter counterpoint: color-coded bubbles for contacts and group chats
That would help me not accidentally sext my mother again.
She’s kinky af tho. 🥵
I thought this shit was a meme till I started texting someone yesterday to arrange a date, she said “you don’t have iPhone?”…
I don’t text until we’ve had sex the first time as a rule, I show them my tiny penis and while they’re in shock I let them know about my android too.
Hahahaha brilliant
Do people not realize how vain and materialistic that makes them sound? As if iPhone ownership is the pinnacle of wealth or whatever
I knew a pretty well off dude who used a flip-phone…in 2018. If he wanted to do computer-type stuff, he just used a computer.
Ngl that’s kinda badass
No because the people they talk to who could tell them all have iphones too
Elliot Rodger vibes
Sounds like she saved you a lot of trouble, lol
yikes, majority of the world uses android
Might want to mark this as sarcasm
What is sarcasm?
Never go /s. Let the rubes be confuddled. They deserve it.
Oh you mean that other completely artificial limitation that Apple insists on having in their os?
But they’re green, I don’t know how that can be changed.
Oh, it was sarcasm all along.
What is sarcasm?
Looking at iOS innovations going in android direction, they gonna make iphone with green bubbles someday and present it as amazing innovation, bet they even make you pay for subscription to make your bubbles green
A part of Apple’s Going Green initiative, for $99.99 weekly you can show everyone how green you are.
Another mother earth promo video incoming
I hope it’s an option you can toggle. I like the existing system which is essentially a list view where it reflows when you remove an icon. My desktop icons are set to work like this too.
I wonder how they’ve implemented this for iPads since there the way the layout behaves (list vs 2D grid) actually makes a difference when you rotate the screen.
To be fair, as both an iOS and Android user, the way android moves icons around drives me crazy , I much prefer the iOS “shift everything down” approach
As an exclusively Android user, I couldn’t agree more
Get a new launcher in your life!
I see what you mean, and this could be easily fixable with a toggle.
Isn’t that launcher dependent?
Not sure, I have a Pixel and use the stock everything
That’s my favorite too but every since they were sold* I’m hesitant to recommend them. I’m too accustomed to swiping up/down on icons for shortcuts.
Removed by mod
So you just run the older version?
Removed by mod
Ugh, I would not even use Android if I could not root…
Glad I’m on iPhone where I don’t have to worry about “launchers” and everything works out of the box.
Androids work out of the box too. The point is if you don’t like the way it works you can find alternatives. If you like stock iPhone that’s fine but I find it claustrophobic.
You’re talking to a bunch of geeks. There’s nothing wrong with the default pixel launcher. I used it for years. Most of these people have a butt ugly home screen and all kinds of ridiculous customizations that no one else has time for.
I cannot refute any of this.
Ignorance. The mark of a true apple cult follower.
Happy because no choice. Android works pretty well with default one but lauchers helps to overthrow what oem gives
Well… There’s yer problem
I they didn’t need Steve jobs to think for them they wouldn’t have bought Apple.
Tbh the default launchers for mobile are garbage. Scrolling around looking for icons on a desktop like environment is not intuitive. Everyone’s home screens just become a junk drawer of every app they’ve ever downloaded.
Niagra, Lynx, Olauncher(FOSS, previously Sentient launcher), are all very differebt cool usable launchers
Microsoft launcher master race.
microsoft launcher sucks
you suck
My Home Screen
Mine looks very similar, but I use Before Launcher. Which launcher is that?
It’s called Blank.
I use it to make my phone less appealing and thus waste less time on it.
Not sure if it works the same, but it seems to create shortcuts to open the apps when you click the text.
They can rip Niagara launcher from my cold dead hands I’m never going back to icon panels
Niagara is wonderful. Clean feel and only minor issues. Best one I have used in years
Genuinely the only way I want to use my phone. Everything I use daily is on the home screen, everything else I have to go searching for. White background, black icons, all notifications turned off. Simple and easy!
I can’t seem to find info on it other than a few screenshots on the play store. Do you choose the home screen apps or are they auto-selected?
My launcher of choice right now is KISS which looks similar by default but I can’t tell if they function the same. Anyone tried both KISS and Niagara?
Let me know what you find out, I also use kiss
See the other reply by @CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
Awesome thank you!
You choose the apps. It will also auto-add apps based on usage.
I just installed KISS to check it out, this is really nice too! I think niagara has a couple more bells and whistles, but it also could be I’m unfamiliar.
- sliding across app for quick select options is missing, haven’t figured out how to access these yet (ie to jump directly into composing an email or text)(See edit 2)
- inline notifications is a big difference standing out for me, I still need to use the notification bar?
- KISS seems very focused on their search bar which is feeling like a bit more typing. I can tap the circle for an app list but it’s on the far side of the phone? (See edit 1)
- Niagara tries to be smart enough to bring apps you’ll want to the front homepage, when youll need it. ie connecting to Bluetooth headphones pushes my Spotify to the top. I know KISS doesn’t know my habits, but it seems simpler based on history of launches.
- niagara relies on more gestures and swipes
- KISS adding contacts to the home screen is a neat approach, people centric design is good
Overall It’s small details though functionallly they seem very close to me. KISS still great and I love it’s FOSS. They’re doing a solid job of a simple, get stuff done launcher. I don’t want to sound like I’m shilling, but Niagara has a free version you could evaluate for yourself
Edit: hmm after digging through the settings I see KISS supports gestures for the app list - however none of the gestures are functional on my s23. Strange…
Edit2: Ah ha! Quick actions are available from the search, and add themselves to the history. I don’t love having visible duplicates but it’s workable.
Thanks for the run down! I saw there’s a free version but didn’t seem too different, so it’s good to get the opinions of a user!
Rather than having to search everything you can have your commonly used apps show in a list on the home screen. Personally I turn this off and have a clean home screen, but pin favorites above the search bar. Tapping the search bar shows the most commonly used apps.
Also I think gestures are not from search results but from the home screen. I use gestures on my blank home screen. I have it set up so a swipe down opens the notification tray, a swipe right opens the camera, swipe left opens search, swipe up opens browser. But this is customizable. Not sure if it works if you have the common apps list showing on the home screen.
I don’t think KISS has smarts like Niagara seems to. Just showing commonly used apps is about as smart as it gets. To my knowledge no notifications on the home screen either, though you can add widgets so maybe that’s solvable in some way.
Anyway, seems they are similar but Niagara is a bit superior with KISS being a bit inferior but FOSS, both good options!
Well damn, guess I’ll switch over now.
That was the last thing holding you back? No criticism, just genuinely curious.
I am extremely confident it was joke
In retrospect, you’re definitely right lol
As an iPhone bitch, I still found it funny hahaha
This was not allowed before. Until just recently, the technology didn’t exist to place icons anywhere in the grid. They would automatically smoosh up into orderly rows starting at the top-left with no gaps between icons. Apple is continuing to develop cutting edge innovation, though, and now you will be able to leave entire rows and columns empty, or any specific icon space you choose!
Seems like a trivial programming task even my junior noob ass can handle.
Actually it’s because apps aren’t neutrally buoyant in the OS, they naturally float to the top
No wonder it took so long, must’ve been a nightmare to get every different app neutral, what with their differing weights.
They had to invent whole new algorithms to he able to give the binaries of all apps the exact same Hamming weight
Dear god, someone needs to make a physics based home screen. It would be utter hell. When you move, it all gets tossed around.
Auto rotate works on all angles…
Widgets are now 3d boxes and you have to tilt your phone down and flip it until they face you.
Particle simulation home screen
There’s probably a live wallpaper for that.
I mean apps icons that are rigid bodies that are simulated
Oh oh. Gotcha. Imagine not being able to make an emergency phone call until it settled down.
COURAGE!!
Welcome to 2013, Apple fans! Maybe in 5 more years you’ll get home screen widgets.
Shit - my first Android phone had widgets, customizable homescreen (not just icons - but the entire layout an launcher), and anything else custom you wanted back in 2009.
15 years late to the game in an industry that’s effectively 17 years old…
I’m not sure about iPhones, but iPads have had homescreen widgets for a whole year, maybe even two!
I remember having this feature on my jailbroken iPhone in like 2009. Wild that it took this long.
Welcome to 2013, Apple fans! Maybe in 5 more years you’ll get home screen widgets.
We actually do have home screen widgets, as of like 2020. They got it sometime before I had my iPhone. And an app drawer!
As a former Android user, my iPhone home screen looks wildly different from people who’ve had iPhones for many years. I have very few icons on my home screen, I have widgets taking up most of the top of the screen to push the icons I do have down near my fingers (because Springboard is still stupid as of iOS 17, as this gif is pointing out), I have more widgets to the left (“Today View,” Apple calls this, it’s basically just a scrolling widget section), and then the app drawer equivalent to the right (which Apple calls “App Library”). It’s clean and beautiful and reminiscent of my lovely Nova launcher setup I had on my beloved OnePlus 7T Pro (may it rest in peace).
Whereas most longtime iPhone users just have page after page after page of apps and folders. Every app they own is on there somewhere. Which is ridiculous since on iOS you can just swipe down, type the first few letters of the app, and there it is.
We had them before that but they were different and not a lot of stuff made use of them
They were kind of shit, and confined to that left-most view. The new widget system they added a couple of years ago is really nice, and the addition of making them interactive with the last update was solid too.
As someone that uses both iPhone and Android, the way it is right now Apple’s widgets feel better. I can’t quite put my finger on why exactly that is, but like with pretty much everything (stock) Android, it just feels a little bit janky. It works just fine, and I really like the adaptive theme thing that my Pixel 6 has going on, but it feels a bit off.
I toyed around with the phones side by side, and I think honestly it’s mostly just that Apple must be spending a fuckton of hours just working on getting animations to flow smoothly. That’s the main difference I notice between my Pixel 6 and my 15 Pro Max. They both have 120hz screens, but the latter doesn’t have any sort of flickering, weird clipping, animations that drop/bug out, etc. while the Pixel does.
I recorded two screencaps, doing roughly the same things, so I could see it side by side. This is from my iPhone, and this is my Pixel 6. I enabled the “record touch gesures” thingy on Android, an option I’ve no idea where/if it exists on iOS.
What’s interesting is, I learned that it actually does pick up my gesure when I try to open the app switcher, it just either ignores it, or I’m not precise enough. I’ve never had this issue on my iPhones, but I have it almost every time I use my Pixel. Then there’s a bunch of random flickering. One app is “censored” and it shows my wallpaper instead, which is a bit odd but that’s fine. When dismissing the drawer, it remains briefly above the homescreen before just vanishing out of existence.
On iOS all the animations are smooth, nothing pops, flickers, or jerks. Even the padding in the widget drawer is eased in and out of existence.
Does it matter? That’s subjective. Both are solid phones, and for the price I paid for the 15 Pro Max it fucking better be. With Android you have a lot more freedom, of course. It’s not really something I value in my daily driver as my iPhone does all I want from it with zero hassle.
Before the app library existed you just had to have all the apps on a page and could not hide them. I ended up having like 20 page of apps. I eventually cleaned things up and have a page with apps I use, another page of widgets I use, and that’s it. But it took me years before I thought to do that.
It’s funny, I’ve had an Android, a Nokia Windows Phone, and an iPhone, and Windows Phone was the only OS in which I didn’t open every single app through search. The utter lack of an app ecosystem definitely played a part, but I honestly don’t think either of the other two handle home screens/“app drawers” very well. Every modern social media platform/messenger/etc. is built around vertical continuous scrolling because it’s easier. Why is horizontal, paginated scrolling the default for home screens?
That’s a good point. Now that you mention it, I would much rather my Home Screen scroll down and I can add as many apps and widgets as I want.
The current iPhone page feels a bit claustrophobic now. Thanks.
Oh I know, it was madness. I briefly had a used iPhone 3GS and then was pure Android until 2022 when I got an iPhone. By the time I came back it was customizable enough that I could make it look like Android, but that’s work for someone who lived with the terrible setup it originally had. I don’t blame existing iPhone users, it’s just something I’ve noticed.
Always about 7 years behind android. Smh
I know, right? It also took them years to improve their notifications to work like Android’s (still aren’t quite as good). And I STILL can’t do what this gif is showing because iOS 18 isn’t out.
“Pay more for less!” - Tim Apple
Welcome to 2024, Apple hater! All the things you bash Apple for already exist, but you’re so blind you can’t take 5 minutes to do some homework about it. This whole thread is about icons not snapping to a grid, imagine being so petty you have to bring out the full hatred for something so meaningless. I’ve never once heard an Apple fan flame android OS like this
Bro, you can’t be for real, can you? Apple fans have been shitting on Android non-stop since it was created.
Oh, so “Glad you guys are finally getting features we had over a decade ago” is “full hatred”, but “I’m sorry, did you just send me a green text? didn’t know you were broke” is fine?
iOS already has widgets?
This interaction is so indicative of the reality of device fandom.
The Android user isn’t storing information about the iPhone in their brain.
The iPhone user is responding like everybody knows everything about iPhone features and it was dumb of the android user to not know this thing.
2013? Pretty sure you could do this on Android waaaay before that.
My first Android was an HTC Hero, which was released in ~ October of 2009.
One of the first things I did was swap the location of the Maps and Store icons to make it easier to reach on the edge of the phone.
I recall people complaining that same year that the iPhone 1 couldn’t copy or paste text.
:)
COURAGE!!
Dude you cannot just post something that good and not share. I love nier.
