The battle of the Launchers

Since the whole Android OS is open-sourced, its keystone lies precisely on personalizing. That’s it: the power to the people (or the users). There are lots of apps that lets you change your Android performance, appearance or interface. Without shadow of a doubt the most used apps for changing the default appearance of your Android are the launchers. A launcher is an app that basically changes the appearance of the dock, app drawer, widgets and icons of your Android as well as its performance. It wide open the customizing range of your device. Welcome to the Launchers Week in AndroidZoom.

Today we’re going to zoom in the most popular launchers on the market: LauncherPro, ADW.Launcher and Go Launcher EX. Let’s start!

LauncherPro

LauncherPro is probably the most downloaded (and so used) launcher on the market. It contains a minimalist scrolilng dock with five icons, a configurable app drawer vertical-scrolling (Nexus 3D included), 1-7 home screens high configurable (transitions, grid size, labels, backgrounds…).
However, the strongest point of LauncherPro is its Widgets (although you have to upgrade to LauncherPro Plus, $2.99). Highly configurable widgets to have everything at your fingertips. LauncherPRO is focused on fast access, professional widgets and improved performance. If you give more importance to performance instead of colorful themes, this is your launcher.

ADW.Launcher

This is a launcher from a different approach. While LauncherPro is focused on fast performance, ADW.Launcher is about appearance. Precisely for that it was the first releasing launcher themes and it’s actually the one with the biggest collection of them (500+). As well as LauncherPro changes dock, icons an app drawer. It has even more settings than LauncherPro but most of them are related to appearance (and some of them are useless). It works slower than others (especially than  LauncherPro). Anyway, we recommend you to take a glance at some of the themes. You will fall in love with some of theme and you’ll probably won’t care about the rest.

Go Launcher EX

It’s a kind of mix of LauncherPro and ADW.Launcher, although it has also unique features. From our point of view, this is the most complete Launcher on the market. However, it doesn’t mean the “best” (that depends on what you’re looking for). Go Launcher EX is fast, there’s no screen limit, it contains a swipable and customizable dock, the app drawer is highly-configurable (icon effect, transition effects, background, “running apps” tab with task killer included, grid size…), and a wide range of features to improve your Android performance. What’s more, it also supports themes, not as many as ADW.Launcher, but there are lots of them. There are free and paid widgets and lots of add-ons and plug-ins (i.e. the unread sms/mms/gmail/calls counter).
Go Launcher EX is probably the most balanced launcher. Maybe it’s that way because it mixes the best features of other launchers. Anyway, this is our option.

There are though some other alternative launcher, not as popular as these, but which are getting good feedback for users: Launcher 7, Zeam Launcher, DXHome and many others.

What’s yours?

Happy Android Launchers discovery!