Almost a month after, Carl Pei’s Nothing held its event where it took the wraps off its Nothing OS that will be powering the upcoming Nothing Phone (1) Nothing has silently launched the beta version of its Nothing Launcher for select Android devices, giving us a tase of its upcoming operating system.
That said, here’s a closer look at Nothing’s Nothing Launcher that will be powering its upcoming smartphone and how you can try it out on your smartphone:
Nothing Launcher; A Closer Look
Starting from when you first open the new launcher, there isn’t much differentiating the Nothing launcher from the no-nonsense stock Android AOSP/Pixel Launcher, and offers a set of standard circular app icons, a google search bar and so on paired with its custom wallpaper and animations.
However, things change upon a closer look. As a preview, the Nothing Launcher includes some tweaks, including what Pei’s company calls “Max Icons” and “Max Folders.”, which allows you to hold down the app’s icon or folder to increase the icon size and makes the icon or folder go from a 1×1 size to 3×3 making the app more user accessible.
For those who like to use widgets, the launcher comes with three, two different clocks and a weather widget, both of which feature the same dot matrix typography as Nothing’s branding. Meanwhile, the widget selection UI is very similar to Android 12’s default widget selection UI and offers an additional undo button to restore a widget in case you delete it by mistake.
But on the downside, as it is expected from a beta app out there, there does not appear to be support for the Google Discover feed, the new animations are a bit laggy and some widgets including the two clocks seem to be broken in our testing.
Lastly, Nothing has also shared two new wallpapers and a few ringtones designed by its partner company Teenage Engineering to go along with its launcher which can be downloaded from this dropbox link.
How to Try it Out on Your Device?
If we were to go by Nothing’s YouTube video on How to install Nothing Launcher (Beta), the Nothing Launcher will be available to download as a beta preview from Google Play Store and will only run on select devices including the recent Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel lineup of devices which is a bummer.
But surprisingly enough, we were still able to find a way to get over these software restrictions and test out the new launcher on unsupported devices, and here’s a guide on how we did it and how you too can do it:
- Download the XAPK (Split installation file) of Nothing Launcher beta on your smartphone by visiting this ApkMirror link.
- Next go to Google Play Store and search for APKMirror Installer and download it.
- Once installed, open the APKMirror Installer and accept all the permissions and then tap on Browser files to choose the Nothing Launcher XAPK file from your downloads folder.
- Now tap on Install package which takes you to another page where you will need to tap on Install app to start the installation process.
- Once completed you will have successfully installed the Nothing Launcher on your Android device.
Lastly you will need to enabled the launcher manually in the settings app to try it out, which can be done by following these additional steps:
- Go to settings > Apps > Default Apps > Default Home
- Select Nothing Launcher and close the settings app
- And viola you have successfully entered the Nothing Launcher
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What do you think about the Nothing Launcher? Let us know in the comments section below. Until then stay tuned with OyPrice and don’t forget to Join us on Telegram, Facebook, or Twitter to stay up to date with the latest happenings in the tech industry
