Char Launcher

The brief

A phone’s home screen is designed to be looked at. Grids of bright icons, badges and folders all compete for attention, and the result is a device that pulls you in every time you unlock it to do one thing. Minimal launchers exist, but most strip the screen back to plain text and stop there — calm, but hard to live with once you want a widget, the weather, or a separate page for work.

Char is our own product, and the brief was a home screen that feels less like a slot machine and more like a tool, without giving up the things a home screen is actually for. And because a launcher sees every app you open and every notification you get, the second rule mattered as much as the first: no accounts, no ads, no analytics, and no server of ours that ever receives anyone’s data.

The details

The news feed is the part we’re proudest of, because the easy version would have been a privacy problem. Instead of sending reading habits to a server, Char ranks stories on the phone: each headline’s freshness decays with a six-hour half-life, then gets weighted by how often you open that topic and that outlet. The weights are smoothed — every topic starts as if you’d seen twenty of its stories and opened two — so one curious tap can’t take over the feed, and old habits fade by half every thirty days. A headline only counts as seen once it has been fully on screen for a second and a half. None of it leaves the device, and “Forget what Char learned” wipes it.

The same rule shaped the plumbing. Weather comes from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, with the location rounded to about 11 km before it leaves the phone. Feed and weather requests identify themselves as Char rather than with Android’s default, which names the phone model. Notification dots keep only which apps have notifications, in memory, and never read them. Even Pro is checked against Google Play on the device, because a licence server would have meant running a server.

A launcher is the most-used screen on the phone, so it has to feel instant. Each row is laid out once at full size and only scaled and faded while drawing, so scrolling never re-measures the list. Page backgrounds blend into each other mid-swipe, and the colour shuffle keeps redrawing until the text clears a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, so a random palette can never make the screen unreadable.

The outcome

Char launched on Google Play in October 2026, within a week of the first commit — free, with Char Pro as a one-time upgrade. It runs on Android 8.0 and up, on phones and tablets, with 66 automated tests behind the feed ranking, purchase verification and database migrations.