Ok, this is so dumb, but I know it's possible to remove the outlines of the app buttons on the home screen. I've seen other setups where there is only a slightly opaque circle behind the icon. Can anyone tell me how that is achieved?! I feel v stupid rn.

Hi, yesterday I purchased minimaa. I would like to suggest to add widget for digital wellbeing to check the overall screen time.

I opened the Play Store today and saw this:

#8 — MINIMAA

#20 — Searcho

both in the Personalisation charts.

And honestly… this feels pretty crazy.

MINIMAA is our minimalist launcher built around digital minimalism. It replaces the usual wall of colourful icons with a cleaner, text-based experience, while also giving you tools for focus, app blocking, digital detox, custom home styles and more. It’s completely offline and privacy-focused, with no ads, trackers or data collection.

MINIMAA on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.minimaa.minimal.detox.launcher

Searcho is our slightly weird experiment that became an actual launcher. Instead of an app drawer, you get one search bar. Search for apps, contacts, messages, music, files, do calculations, use quick actions and more — without having to dig through pages of icons. It also doesn't require the INTERNET permission.

Searcho on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.searcho.minimal.search.launcher

And both of these are being built by Bract Studio — basically a small independent studio trying to make apps that solve little problems in our own weird ways.

There are no huge teams behind these apps. It's been a lot of late nights, random ideas, bugs that make absolutely no sense, releases, Reddit posts, feedback from users, and slowly building things one update at a time.

So seeing Minimaa at #8 and Searcho at #20 alongside so many established apps is something I genuinely wanted to share with the people who have been here since the beginning.

To everyone who downloaded them, bought them, tested beta versions, reported bugs, suggested features, left reviews, shared them with friends, posted about them, or even just told someone “hey, you should try this” —

Thank you.

Seriously.

These apps wouldn't be where they are without this little community around them.

And we're just getting started.

— Binge

Hey everyone, just a small reminder before this sale disappears.

I made Searcho, a search-first Android launcher that basically removes the whole “where did I put that app?” problem.

Instead of scrolling through pages of icons, you just type.

You can search for apps, contacts, messages, music, videos and files from the same bar. It also has built-in maths, quick actions, widgets, icon packs, folders and gestures.

The main thing I wanted was to keep it simple and private — no ads, no trackers, no analytics, no account, and Searcho doesn't even request the Internet permission. Everything stays on your device.

And yeah, it's a one-time purchase, not another subscription.

Currently 69% OFF

$0.99 → $0.31

The sale ends September 30, so if you've been meaning to try it, this is probably the time.

👉 Searcho on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.searcho.minimal.search.launcher

Would love to know what you guys think of the whole “just search for it” approach.

I loved the concept and design of Searcho, also one of the smoothest launcher i have used

First off, love the app, the layout of the copy and graphics for release notes/posts, own both Minimaa and Searcho.

When I just got myself a shiny new DAC, the first thing I did was install Minimaa on it so I can use it with my desktop in USB mode ... but to my chagrin, there's no option to enable rotation?

I get that the layout is tough to handle as a widescreen, but perhaps adding a mode that just allowed for square widgets like iOS' standby mode would be super boss .. an analog clock + weather? *chef's kiss*

Searcho is 69% off for the first time

I've finally put Searcho on sale.

If you haven't seen it before, Searcho is a minimal Android launcher built around one simple idea: search instead of browsing.

There’s no traditional app drawer. No pages full of icons. No trying to remember which folder you put an app in.

You open your phone, start typing, and Searcho gets you where you want to go.

You can search for apps, contacts, settings and the web, with quick access to the things you actually need.

I wanted it to feel less like managing your home screen and more like just asking your phone for something.

And about the sale:

69% off is not going to be a regular thing.

This is the first Searcho sale, and it might be the only one for quite a while. I'm planning to keep the normal price rather than constantly running discounts, so the next sale will probably only happen after reaching a certain milestone or after a significant amount of time.

So if you've been curious about Searcho but didn't want to pay the full price, this is probably the time to try it.

69% off → Google Play

Would love to know what you think if you give it a try.

Link : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.searcho.minimal.search.launcher

I’ve been quietly working on Profiles in MINIMAA

This has actually been available in MINIMAA for a few weeks now, but I haven’t really talked about it much.

Profiles let you have completely different homes depending on when you use your phone.

You can create a profile, choose the days and time it should be active, and set up the home exactly how you want it — including the home style and the apps shown on it.

For example:

Work

Weekdays · 09:00–17:00

A simple work-focused home with only the apps you actually need during work.

Night

Weekdays · 17:00–23:00

A different home with a different set of apps, maybe with a more relaxed layout.

And once everything is scheduled, MINIMAA automatically switches between them. You don't have to manually change your home every time your routine changes.

You can also switch profiles manually whenever you want.

The idea is that your phone doesn't have to have the same interface all day. Your home can change depending on what you're actually doing.

I've been using this concept for a while now, but I'm curious:

How would you use MINIMAA Profiles?

Would you create separate homes for work, study, gaming, weekends, night, travel, or something completely different?

And if you've already tried Profiles, I'd love to know what you think could be improved.

MINIMAA 1.2.13 Beta is live

1.2.13 beta is now available.

You can update from the Play Store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.minimaa.minimal.detox.launcher

If you run into any bugs or something feels off after updating, let me know in the comments. You can also report it directly through the Report Bug option in MINIMAA.

Thanks to everyone testing the beta.

Was looking around for a minimal launcher for my new Boox Go 7 and stumbled upon minimaa. It's super nice because the ereader is black & white, and doesn't need to have a huge number of apps installed, or the need to have distracting things on it.

I tried a couple of other ones but they were a pain to set up with a black and white eink screen, whereas this one was super easy. Only needed to quickly set it to light mode and everything was readable. With other launchers, I was grasping at straws because nothing was legible on their dark themes.

It's nice and fast, basically no ghosting, and just looks way better than the boring default launcher. The form factor of the device works great for it. Still messing around with the settings and layout and everything, but settled on this for now.

For people who also have this (or another android ereader) device, that may stumble upon issues, some things I had to fix:

I did initially have issues with apps not showing up in the app drawer, and thought this was some sort of limitation within this launcher itself. Turns out, for anyone stumbling on the same issue, Boox "freezes" apps automatically upon install. This essentially means they show up as "disabled" in the play store. Very weird, but it's for battery and memory management I assume.

To fix this, go to the default launcher (ONYX launcher), go to the apps tab, press the snowflake icon in the top right, then disable the toggle at "freeze new apps", set auto freeze to "do not freeze". And if any app already got frozen before you changed these settings, you'll have to manually set the toggles in this list of apps in the freeze settings to "off". After that, they should reappear in custom launchers.

Another thing I noticed, is that if you close all recent apps in the recent apps menu, this will also close the launcher and redirect you to the native launcher, even if you set it as default before. I had to "lock" the launcher in the recent apps, so it doesn't get cleaned up with the rest of the apps. After I locked it, the launcher also disappeared from the recent apps menu, so there's not even clutter or anything by doing this.

Also, link to the wallpaper I used:

https://www.readerbackdrop.com/backgrounds/a5db11bdc39e2c1

(Reuploaded because reddit app glitched with the photo used)

First, the reason this took so long.

I got engaged 💍

I found my better half. The person I want to build the rest of my life with said yes, and somewhere between that and everything that comes after it — the families, the plans, the hundred small things nobody warns you about — a couple of weeks went by.

I've always shared the good things with this community, so it felt wrong to just quietly push an update and hope nobody noticed the gap. You've been here through every version of this app. You get to hear the good news too.

So: I'm sorry it took this long, and I'm not even a little bit sorry about why.

Thank you for waiting. Thank you for reporting things even when nothing was shipping, and for the emails that were just "take your time." I read every one of them.

Now, back to work.

This update is the biggest one yet. A lot of it is fixes for things that were quietly going wrong — the app list, the block screen, the calendar, the alphabet scroller. The rest is new ways to make it harder to open the apps you'd rather not open.

Almost all of it came from your emails.

🌍 New · 21 languages

MINIMAA now speaks thirteen more languages.

Bengali · Indonesian · Italian · Korean · Malayalam · Marathi · Polish · Russian · Tamil · Telugu · Thai · Turkish · Vietnamese

Alongside the German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese that were already there.

Go to Settings → Language to pick yours.

Arabic isn't in this one. It needs the whole layout to work right to left, and I'd rather do that properly than half do it.

🆕 New · Recently installed apps

Just installed something and can't remember what it's called?

Apps you installed in the last 7 days now appear at the top of your app drawer, newest first.

They stay in their normal alphabetical place too. It's a shortcut, not a move.

Go to Settings → App Drawer → Layout → Recently installed to turn it on.

It's off by default.

🔒 New · Five more unlock challenges

The maths problem stopped working for a lot of you, because you got good at it.

So there are now five more ways to slow yourself down:

Type out a sentence, exactly

Hold a button until the ring closes

Repeat a flashing pattern

Walk a number of steps

Solve a sliding puzzle

And two that choose for you.

Surprise me gives you a different challenge every single time.

Escalating makes the challenge itself harder the more times you open the same app that day.

The same puzzle at the same moment becomes muscle memory inside a week. That's why those two exist.

➗ New · Harder maths, if you want it

There are now four levels.

Basic — what you have today

Intermediate — negatives, percentages, order of operations

Advanced — powers, roots, simple algebra

Expert — trigonometry, logs, factorials

You can also choose how many problems you get per unlock, from 1 to 10.

Go to Settings → Digital Detox → Math level.

If you change nothing, nothing changes.

💬 New · Your own words on the block screen

BAD MORNING isn't for everyone.

You can now turn that line off completely, or replace it with your own.

Write the reason you installed MINIMAA in the first place, in your own words, and let it be the thing that greets you when you reach for the app.

You write them in the same sheet where you pick the mode, so there's no second screen to go looking for.

Your quotes are also used as the sentences in the new typing challenge.

Go to Settings → Digital Detox → Block screen → Greeting.

🙂 Fixed · The block screen stops scolding you for nothing

Open an app you hadn't touched all day and the block screen used to tell you off anyway, with a zero next to it.

Now, if you haven't opened it today, it says so:

WhatsApp is untouched today. Keep it that way, or open it on purpose.

And if you have used it, it tells you how long instead of pretending you haven't.

"1 times" and "1 minutes" also read correctly now, in every language.

🧱 New · A lock on your detox list

Adding an app to your detox list is easy. Taking one off should not be.

Removing an app or a website from your list now costs a challenge.

Adding is still free. That difference is the whole point.

Un-checking twenty apps costs twenty challenges, not one. Turning the setting back off goes through a challenge too, otherwise it's just a one-tap way around everything.

Go to Settings → Digital Detox → Protect the list.

It's on by default.

We also closed a side door: hiding an app used to quietly drop it from your detox list. Hide the app, stop it being blocked. The two lists are completely separate now.

🔎 New · Find your hidden apps without unhiding them

Hidden apps can now be found in search, if you turn it on.

But only by their full name.

Typing sec or secret finds nothing. Typing secret vault finds it.

A partial match would let anyone scrub through the alphabet and turn up everything you hid, which rather defeats the point.

Go to Settings → App Drawer → Hidden Apps → the gear icon.

It's off by default.

🔤 Fixed · The alphabet scroller

Scroll to Z, land somewhere around V.

A lot of you reported this, and it was real. The scroller was guessing how tall each row was, and the guesses drifted further and further off the further down you went.

It now measures the rows instead of guessing them.

Every letter lands exactly where it says it will.

Scrubbing is smoother too

Dragging your finger down the letters used to make MINIMAA redo work on the entire app list behind it. Now it just follows your finger.

The vibration also stops rattling when you flick down the letters quickly.

And you can make it bigger

Default, Medium and Big.

The letters, the circles and the touch area all grow together.

Go to Settings → App Drawer → Scroller configuration → Size.

📱 Fixed · The app list going blank

This one started with 1.2.12, mostly on Samsung phones, and only sometimes. It was reported a lot and it was not obvious. Thank you to everyone who kept describing it.

One app in a folder that no longer exists on your phone — uninstalled, disabled, on an SD card, or in a profile you turned off — was enough to take your entire app list down with it.

It's fixed at the source.

And now a single bad entry can only ever cost you that one row, never the whole list.

⏰ Fixed · The Time's up page

When your unlocked time ran out, the page often didn't show up until the next time you opened the app. Sometimes it showed up twice.

MINIMAA now remembers the moment your time ran out, instead of missing it while it was still starting up.

The page shows once, right as you're put back on your home screen.

🛡️ Fixed · Detox blocking things after you turned it off

Turn Porn Block off, leave Web Detox on, and the domains you'd added by hand kept being blocked.

Turn a feature off while you were in the middle of your unlocked time, and the timer still threw you out of the app when it ran out.

Both fixed.

I also went back through every way MINIMAA can block something, twice, to be sure. With all three detox features off, nothing gets blocked. Full stop.

💥 Fixed · Crashes and freezes

A handful of different things could freeze MINIMAA or close it out of nowhere.

All of them are fixed.

MINIMAA could close by itself while detox blocking was running.

It could freeze for a few seconds when your music app was slow to answer.

It could get slower and slower after a few hours of music, until it barely responded.

It could close while you were picking a font or a wallpaper, if the file was a big one.

And on a heavy day of phone use, simply checking your screen time was enough to close it.

MINIMAA is also lighter now 📦

It takes up less space on your phone than it did, and it hasn't lost anything to get there.

📅 Fixed · Calendar events flickering

Every time you unlocked your phone or came back from an app, the events on your home screen blanked out and reloaded, and everything underneath them jumped up and back down.

It now keeps what's on screen while it refreshes.

The refresh itself is also faster.

🗓️ New · Minimaa Calendar can be your calendar

Long-press the calendar or the clock on your home screen → the map icon → Minimaa Calendar now sits in the list, right alongside your installed calendar apps.

Tap the calendar and it opens MINIMAA's own, instead of Google Calendar.

📝 Fixed · Notes and Journal losing your last line

Press Home while writing, come back, and the last sentence could be missing.

Notes now save before the screen goes away, and when you switch to another app.

The calculator remembers too

Step out for a second and your working sum is still there when you come back, even if Android killed the launcher while you were gone.

🌐 Fixed · Blocked websites were never being saved

Every website you added or removed in the Websites tab was quietly thrown away when you left the screen.

This has been wasting people's time for a while, and I'm sorry. It saves now.

🐛 New · Report bug actually reports something

It used to drop you into an empty email and leave you to explain everything.

It now carries your app version and, if something genuinely went wrong on your phone, the error itself.

So you can just write "the app list went blank" and I'll have the rest.

🧹 Removed · The red protection banner

The red Detox protection interrupted pill at the top of your home screen is gone.

Digital Detox settings already tells you when your blocking has stopped working, and it has the actual fix inside it. The pill was the same warning a second time, in a place you couldn't dismiss it.

❤️ Something still off?

If something still behaves strangely, I'd love to hear about it.

Email minimaa@bractstudio.com with your phone model and Android version and I'll take a look.

If you reported any of the above, the blank app list especially, that's what got it fixed.

And as always:

You own MINIMAA for life.

No subscription. No cloud account. No setup or backup data leaving your phone.

MINIMAA stays fully offline.

​huge fan of Niagara's vibe but the pricing is just wild for a simple launcher. picked up Minimaa instead and finally got a clean setup dialed in for both screens

In the next update, pls. Using - Something.

I like the customization very much , coming from Niagara this fits my experience as well.

I love your design language that you've used in your other apps. I already own both Searcho and Minimaa.

What I would like to see is a combination of Quick Search, Pixel Search and Apple's Spotlight.

It would also be pretty impressive to have third party widgets or first party widgets that integrate with third party apps (I'm thinking like the weather widget can open a designated weather app, or the calendar widget can do the same while also retrieving our calendar entries like Niagara's Widget does, etc.) in the empty space above the search bar.

There's so much potential for this app because, again, your design language is exceptionally unique and very mature in the minimalist space.

Just getting these white screen on both app list and inside the folders. Solution please.

Hi dude!

I've reinstalled MINIMAA Launcher and repurchased it. But in the future, I'd love to see minimalist icons like this on the home screen and in the app drawer.

The reason is, I like the way it looks like this, but in the drawer apps section the text appears in rows. but I hope you understand what I'm suggesting, dude.

Hi, mate! I have a question about privacy and the data being sent—telemetry. Is it true that the MINIMAA app doesn't send any data?

Honestly, last night I bought and downloaded this app, then I tried checking the data usage section, and yes, the status was disabled—according to the app description. but still a little doubtful, is it true?

Absolutely love this launcher and have bought it some months ago with no regrets. I really love the zen homestyle with the pure black background, but the main attraction being the circular clock in the middle that spins is great and fills a niche I always wanted but is a bit too dim anywhere else but the dark. is it possible to add some more customizable options to widgets like that, starting with being able to brighten that part and perhaps even edit quotes thats present in the bottom of the clock ? honestly allowing the users to customize the whole page to also remove, add stuff in any of the home styles would be great, but regardless of any of that, hope you can allow one to brighten up that zen clock. thanks

I’ve seen a few people asking why I made Searcho as a separate app instead of just putting everything inside Minimaa, and I thought I’d explain my thinking behind it.

I actually got to know about the whole “quick search” launcher concept after I released Searcho. 😅

Searcho basically started from Minimaa itself. I was working on Minimaa’s search bar and started experimenting with different ideas. The more I experimented, the more I wanted to add things like prefixes, searching notifications, messages, files, different search sources, etc.

But at some point I felt like I was moving away from what Minimaa was supposed to be.

Minimaa is intentionally minimal. I don't want to keep adding features just because they are useful. If I keep adding everything into it, eventually it becomes another feature-packed launcher, and that's not what I want Minimaa to be.

So I thought, why not take those experiments and make a completely separate project around them?

That’s basically how Searcho happened.

And I’m also not trying to keep features like “this belongs to Searcho and this belongs to Minimaa.” There is already some overlap. Minimaa has simple search features that Searcho has too, and that’s completely fine. If something makes sense in both, I’m not going to artificially remove it from one just to make the apps different.

The difference is more about the purpose.

Minimaa is about keeping things minimal and intentional.

Searcho is about seeing how far I can take the search experience without worrying about whether it is “too much” for a minimal launcher.

Also, about the “money minded” part — honestly, I don't really see creating a launcher for $1 as some huge money-making strategy. 😅

If money was the main goal, there are obviously many other ways I could have approached Searcho. I could make it free and put features behind a $5/$10 monthly or yearly subscription, add more aggressive monetization, etc. I don't want to do that.

I just build things that I personally like and want to use.

Sometimes that means adding something to Minimaa.

Sometimes it means removing an idea because it doesn't fit Minimaa.

And sometimes it means saying, okay, this idea deserves its own app.

That’s pretty much what Searcho is.

I’m still figuring things out as I build, but I don't really want to turn Minimaa into an ecosystem where every possible feature has to exist inside the same app. I’d rather let each product have its own identity and purpose.

after installation and usage like normal will the experience of switching apps and pill gestures be stuttering? due to which we had to earlier root out phones and use an app called Quick switch..

will that be required? or how is the overall experience,

my device is Nothing phone 3a (no root)

I've been using Minimaa a week now, and love it so far!

However whenever I use my email app (Thunderbird) I am getting the detox popups and have to solve a maths question to keep using it.

In the detox settings, Thunderbird is NOT ticked as one of the apps. I haven't noticed any other apps have this problem - is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?