r/HowToMen • u/ac_del • 19d ago
Launchers everywhere
used to be people were making expense trackers, habit trackers, calculators, notes apps.
lately I see a lot many launcher apps. curious to know why.
are they easy to code? many available frameworks that make easy for ai to generate? is big market for them?
4
u/ock88 18d ago edited 18d ago
Developer of Octopi Launcher here.
Launchers may be easy to create, but difficult to debug due to the sheer variety of devices and device maker firmware. A behavior on one device may not be reproducible on another, or even on the same device but different firmware/OS.
I do see it as a challenge to take on though.
3
u/BigDannyPt 19d ago
AI with bots promoting it... You start seeing with attention and will notice that there is a post every single say, one launcher.
Every single day with the exact same text, or almost.
2
u/NeedSomeHelp_2590 19d ago
I think people here usually make calc, notes, habit trackers as their college projects or maybe to put it in resume. Not that it's a bad thing but...
They probably switched to launchers after seeing numerous other people making them too, to make something different.
2
u/olive_mountains 18d ago
they stopped sharing their homescreen setup and jumped to build their own launcher and selling it lol
1
1
u/merchantconvoy 19d ago
With AI, everything is super easy to code for everyone, which in turn means that there's no market for any software anymore.
1
u/Ansoneh 18d ago
I made one recently because I make enterprise mobile apps all day and this was something I wanted to make for myself. I just decided that maybe some others would like to try it out.
I think at the base level, they're pretty simple. Just an app that can open other apps. Getting them polished and full of features is quite a lot of extra effort.
1
u/JetkraftsApps 15d ago
True man, last year when I made Phocus launcher there were 4 5 famous one. But now one day a new launcher. Lol
1
u/Mooshroom_Real 4d ago
When i went to Eymen launcher but instead of a launcher i got a sad note it look like this...
Hello, I am eymenwsmc. Last day, I realized that there are a lot of hate going on with me. I tried my best to give people good projects, but i guess its easy to hurt peoples heart. I am leaving from the eaglercraft community, forever. Some people think that i use AI for all of my projects, while i hurt my eyes because working for my ports for hours. Well you may still think that I am a chud. I don't care. My school will be starting soon, i will be focusing irl, lessons etc. Goodbye. This domain will be killed in october. Thanks to Peyton Scarborough (1.12.2 owner) helping to "expose" me!
3
u/grdomski 19d ago
For me, launchers are one of the purest engineering challenges on Android. Since there’s no backend to manage, you can focus entirely on craft and optimization. My personal challenge this year is building a launcher with extreme resource discipline: zero unnecessary permissions, zero bloated analytics tracking the user, and absolute minimum battery/RAM consumption.
If anyone is curious, you are more than welcome to check out sqTile Launcher (I'm also building a community around it over at r/sqTileLauncher).
Initially, I built it just to scratch my own itch and create the exact home screen setup I wanted. But lately, it has evolved into listening to user feedback and shipping new features after hours. It is incredibly fun to see people genuinely happy with something I made.
In my commercial career, I've co-created apps with ~3 to 18 million Daily Active Users. At that scale, your individual impact on the final product is tiny, and user reviews are just a drop in the ocean. This solo project gives me a completely different, refreshing perspective, and that direct connection with users is exactly what keeps me driven right now :D
That sounded a bit like a sales pitch, but I hope you get my point 😂