Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I bought my first Android phone in June, the HTC Evo 3D, and have mostly been pleased with the experience.  Before it, I’d used many other types of smartphones, including Windows Mobile Treos, PalmOS Treos, and an old Danger Sidekick, finally ending up with a Palm Pre that lasted me for two years until the Evo 3D.  Going from one phone platform to another to me is not a big deal. You get accustomed to one way of doing things, but it’s not THAT hard to retrain yourself – or at least so far it hasn’t been for me!

One of the nice things about Android is the degree to which you can customize the user interface.  It’s somewhat the opposite of the iPhone’s philosophy  that there is a “perfect” design, or at least universal rules of design that one can use (or “dictate” depending on your view) to make an easier interface for 90% of users and discount the other 10% as freaks.  Ok, so it’s probably true that you can follow design principles to come up with a general “best fit” way of operating a cell phone for most people, and this often just means simplicity. But for those 10% of us who like to tweak things, it’s nice to be able to have a phone that you can monkey with, even if you end up spending way more time tweaking things than you would ever save by having an interface more conducive to your brain.  In other words, Google does not dictate design, they suggest it and let users change things around, even if those changes are bad for most people.  To a certain extent it’s democracy vs. tyranny or perhaps letting your kids make their own choices (and mistakes) in order to learn things for themselves, instead of making all their decisions for them.

Unlike with iPhones, there are many tools made by Android developers that offer enhancements to the user interface, including folder apps, widgets, etc., etc.  One could seriously spend a life time looking at these and evaluating them!  The most complex of these add-ons is the “launcher” which replaces the main interface of the device – the home screen, app drawer, etc.  IE what you see when you exit out of all apps and are facing the main user interface of the phone itself.

When I got my phone, I knew that these launchers existed, but I resisted the temptation to play with them.  My phone comes with a “skin” which is a kind of launcher itself, but one that has been installed by the phone’s manufacturer, often embeded in the phone’s Read Only Memory.  My phone’s skin is HTC’s “Sense” and it is pretty good as these go, having gotten pretty good ratings overall.  Still, I knew that eventually I would feel compelled to look for more sophisticated launchers and so decided to finally embark on this project.

There are probably a couple of dozen Android launchers available for download, maybe more.   But there are a “Big 3″ that normally get discussed most in Android circles because they have a large set of features and are very popular compared to the others. Those Big 3 are ADW Launcher EX, Launcher Pro, and Go Launcher.  In addition to these, there’s Zeam, which some people seem to like because it is lighter on their older, less powerful phones that can’t handle all the sophisticated features (and memory requirements) of the Big 3.  There’s another launcher I decided to look at as well, but kind of from “afar” – SPB Shell 3D.  The company that makes that launcher has been around for many years, well before the first Android phone, makeing similar products for PalmOS and Windows Mobile. The reason my look was from “afar” was that SPB Shell 3D is  priced well above the average Android app (launcher or not) at $15.  That price might be reasonable if some of its competitors were anywhere close, but that’s not the case – it’s more than triple the price of any competitor, and I doubt it’s really more than three times as good as any other launcher out there.  Without any way to actually try the app out, I refuse to shell out so much for the app.  There are many, many more launchers out there and I tried several others, but none of them seemed to have half the features of the Big 3 and there was something not quite as polished about most of  them, so I stuck to ONLY 5 launchers.

I won’t include a big descriptive piece about each launcher in this article – that’s been done on many similar posts by other authors who try to distill a given launcher into a long paragraph that’s supposed to summarize its strengths and weaknesses.  Instead, I will share a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet I created that attempts to seperate and organize the various features for each launcher.  This spreadsheet is far from perfect or complete, I’m sure I missed many features and possibly it has some inaccuracies due to my not being able to figure out how to accomplish a given feature. And for SPB Shell 3D, I had to simply leave much of the features blank because I couldn’t play with the app myself.

So, because there are probably lots of deficiencies, as well as features which will be added to some of these Launchers after this article is posted, I’m hoping that you the reader can enlighten me so that I can continue to make this spreadsheet more accurate and complete.

I often find making these kinds of spreadsheets helpful because they can quantify features in a way that is hard to grasp by simply using these apps for an extended period of time.  To quantify things a bit further, I also created a kind of scoring system where I assigned points based on whether a feature existed, didn’t exist, or existed but in a less complete way than others.  All of this was very arbitrary of course, and I didn’t assign any weighting because I knew what is important for one person may not be for another.  So while my spreadsheet gives a big point advantage to Go Launcher EX, I still haven’t decided myself whether I’m going to choose that over the others.  Rather, this is the starting off point.  I personally won’t use Zeam because I think it just has too few features for me, and I won’t use SPB Shell 3D because of its price, but otherwise I still need to decide which features are most important to me and pick one of the Big 3.

I have actually been using a “launcher” app for a few months now that is different from all of the ones in the Spreadsheet.  It has no home screens, dock bars, app drawers or the like.  It exists simply as a way to quickly launch apps, shortcuts, and more recently widgets.  It’s called WaveLauncher and I won’t say much else except that I find it so useful and well thought out that I will continue to use it no matter which other launcher I eventually switch to, because it can be used on top of any of those as a great supplement.

Whatever launcher you pick I’d love to know why.  What was the killer feature that it had that the others didn’t or did you just try one out first and after using it for a while just stuck to it out of habit?

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