My Home Screen (Early 2024)

I decided to write about what's on my phone's home screen, apps, shortcuts and things.

I did a post about what’s on my phone late last year, but I felt like sharing my current homescreen setup too, this was inspired by @brendon’s homescreen post.

Although I’ve shared some screenshots before, I’ve never really done full showcase of the whole thing with my gestures and shortcuts. So here it is!

The screens

The lockscreen doesn’t have anything special, but it’s there.

My current homescreen is quite simple. My setup is a single screen with a 12 by 7 grid, with a total of 15 app icons for quick access. I have the default clock widget on top that also shows the date and upcoming alarm. I also disabled the dock—I don’t have any use for it.

The icons I use are from Arcticons, a free and open source icon pack that I have contributed to for a few years already.

The apps

Anyway the apps I have on my homescreen are sorted in 5 columns with 3 rows each. Every column has a certain type of apps in it.

My most important apps are the ones closer to my right thumb, which are my default Phone app, Mihon for manga reading—an alternative to Tachiyomi that is the reader alone a integrated way to get the plugins to access manga from websites—and AntennaPod for Podcasts.

Making use of Nova Launcher’s shortcut gestures, some apps have an extra app I can access by swiping the icon up and down. Swiping down on Mihon will open Librera Reader, my book reader of choice, whenever I don’t use my Kobo. Swiping down on AntennaPod will open YT Music, and up will open Gramophone—or whatever local music player I use, I switch often.

Next column contains my communication apps. My big three are K-9 Mail, which has a swipe down gesture for Proton Mail, Discord that has gestures for Mattermost and Element; and Signal, with gestures for Threema and Conversations

My third column has apps that entertain me, which includes Tusky for mastodon and fediverse accounts (also a gesture for Bluesky), then Brawl Stars because I play it a bit. Cromite is there too (with a gesture for Firefox as well).

Next is my media column, which has Fossify Gallery, Binary Eye, to scan barcodes (for work) and Solid Explorer for file management, that is one of the few apps I paid for—back when I didn’t have a job for stuff like that—and has been worth every penny.

Finally, the last column has whatever other apps I use sometimes, which is KeepassDX (with a gesture for Aegis Authenticator), FeedMe, my feed reader of choice for Android since it integrates with my FreshRSS server, and Droid-ify (with a gesture for the regular Play Store).

All in all, I have access to a ton of apps with just 15 icons in my homescreen.

Final thoughts

You may notice the abscence of WhatsApp and YouTube, which some of my regular readers might expect since they show in my usage stats every month. I actually have a gesture for them rather than an icon, so swiping up and down with two fingers will open one app or the other!

So, yeah, now you have seen through me. These are the icons and apps I use in my setup, quite a lot of stuff packed together, but the result is rather minimal I think.

This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/112290186544237476

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