I love Niagara Launcher and the work that the team has put into making a beautifully minimalist Android home screen—but I would love it even more if it were open source. That’s why, a few times a year, I search for an alternative, and Escape Launcher is my favorite one yet.
Escape Launcher is not available in the Play Store, so you’ll want to grab it from F-Droid.
A minimalist launcher with no app icons
Pretty icons are how they get you
We’re on our phones more often than we want to be, and it’s no surprise why. Apps are designed to hold our attention, and it all starts with the icons themselves. Alternative Android home screens like Niagara Launcher provide us with the means to fight back by hiding these app icons, reducing their allure. This not only reduces the likelihood that I tap on an app other than the one I intended to use, but it also adds a degree of consistency to my home screen. App designers want their icons to be compelling, but they don’t always put in the effort to make sure their designs harmonize with the other apps around them.
Unlike Niagara Launcher, Escape Launcher is text-only. Favorite apps go on a list on your home screen, and you swipe to the left to open a list of all installed apps.
Escape Launcher is hardly the first open-source text-only app launcher. Olauncher has been around long enough to have spawned many forks, so why use Escape Launcher over any of the myriad other Olauncher lookalikes out there?
It all comes down to fonts and spacing
A text-only Android launcher that cares how it looks
I used to carry around a Light Phone 2. That is a small, Android-based feature phone with an E Ink screen. Its entire layout was text-based, with no app icons or the ability to display images at all. I loved it, so I have no problem whatsoever with a text-only interface—but I have never enjoyed Olauncher, and it comes down to how it looks.
The Light Phone developers care about font selection and spacing. This was apparent on the Light Phone 2, and it remains true on the Light Phone 3.
Credit: Light Phone
By contrast, Olauncher looks like a text editor with a transparent background. I’m sure that this is a perk for some people. An unappealing home screen can be an aid in using your phone less. Others don’t find the vibe unattractive at all—I have colleagues who are happy to use OLauncher, and it is absolutely one of the top five open-source Android launchers to consider. But for me, it’s distracting. Every time I pull out my phone, I can’t help but notice all the things that strike me as visually off-putting.
Escape Launcher has just the right amount of spacing between the app names and padding from the edge of the screen. This attention to detail makes the launcher feel like it wasn’t designed by an engineer who is perfectly happy to do everything in VIM.
The app isn’t entirely without personality, despite the lack of images. I can select between various fonts and different colored themes. I found these particularly attractive on my Murena Fairphone 6, where the yellow theme went well with the yellow button on the side of my phone.
In other words, Escape Launcher isn’t merely functional or bland. It manages to ooze personality and can be quite cute.
Like with Niagara, I can open apps faster
It’s easy to get to what I want to do
It’s not uncommon for me to open my app drawer and scroll the icons up and down a few times as I try to remember why I pulled out my phone, so I find it helpful to develop the habit of typing to launch apps instead. Switching to Escape Launcher preserves this muscle memory. I have the keyboard set to automatically appear when I swipe to my app list, and I’ve moved the search bar to the bottom of the screen. I can then type just a few letters and hit enter to launch an app. In not getting distracted by the apps I don’t want, it’s quicker for me to get to the apps that I do.
The number of customization options covers the essentials. I can change the style of the clock, choose whether to view the date and time, and add weather for my current location. There is also support for adding widgets, though I have personally opted to do without. And if there are apps that I don’t want to see in my app drawer, I can hide them.
There is still room for improvement
Escape Launcher is not the fully featured launcher that Niagara Launcher is. It is younger and appears to be primarily the passion project of a single developer. There are features I am still waiting to see added, like the ability to rename apps. But it’s stable enough to already be my favorite open source minimalist launcher when I want an escape from all the noise.