Everyone wants to reinvent the home screen wheel, but the latest comes from a gang who knows a thing or two more about it than anyone else. Larva Labs, the company behind one of the earliest and most radical home-screen replacement apps Slidescreen, has come back with a new concept.
It’s called Flow Home, and its goal is to deal death to the age-old wall of icons. Their goal is to show the the stuff often hidden beneath said icons, using information from your notifications to give you a look at all your latest happenings at a glance.
Photos coming in from the likes of Facebook and Instagram would show, and you’d be given a quick glance at who posted them (and any caption they might have written alongside it). The latest Tweets show up showing you 140 characters of your friends’ mindless musing. Or perhaps you just want to see the contents of your latest email without having to jump into the app. That’s Flow Home’s proposition.
Some might liken it to Windows Phone’s Live Tiles or HTC BlinkFeed, and that wouldn’t be an inaccurate way to put it. Flow Home’s biggest challenge will be to provide a comprehensive launcher experience worth getting rid of your usual freedom for. That is to say you won’t be freely arranging widgets and icons to your hearts’ content if you decide to give it a go as you’ll be sacrificing freedom for a home-screen that aims to be informative.
Apps are still easily accessible using a pie button on the bottom right. It’ll show a handful of your most used apps, though anything else you need can be found by swiping to the right and performing a quick search.
Flow Home is a bit light on extensive customization options (you can change between a few different layouts for the home-screen but not much beyond that), though the team is quick to remind everyone that it’s still in beta and they’ll be doing their best to add many new features where and when they make sense. You can give it a try now from Google Play if you’re interested in trying something a little different.
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