Android phones always feel snappy and responsive when they’re new. Then, somewhere along the way, they start slowing down. The home screen becomes a mess of app icons, widgets, and folders. Even opening the app drawer can feel like going through a digital storage unit, depending on how many apps you have.
While some of Android’s features, especially widgets, actually improved my phone, these phones can get really cluttered, really quickly. Thankfully, there’s a search-focused, open source launcher that can fix that for you.
Why Android feels slow and cluttered
The bloat and friction built into today’s home screens
Most stock Android launchers and even popular third-party alternatives like Nova launcher are built around the same philosophy: multiple home screens filled with app icons, widgets scattered across various pages, and folders to organize everything.
The problem with this approach is that as you install more apps, your phone gets more and more crowded. Each app makes your home screen more crowded, every new widget competes for the same space, and before you know it, you’re spending more time navigating your phone rather than using it.
Your phone screen can only show a limited amount of information with this approach without feeling cluttered. Having more visual elements doesn’t make your phone feel faster, either, often having the opposite effect. The cognitive overhead in deciding which home screen to swipe to, which folder to open, and where you left an app the last time you used it does more harm than putting every possible shortcut and widget on your home screen helps.
What makes Kvaesitso different
A minimalist, open-source rethink of the home screen
Kvaesitso is a search-focused launcher. Instead of spreading apps across multiple home screens, it uses a vertically scrolling layout with a clean, minimal home screen at the top featuring a clock and some optional widgets. Everything else, including but not limited to your apps, files, contacts, calendar events, and even web search results, lives in a search interface just a swipe away.
This approach doesn’t require you to maintain a perfectly organized home screen. Your phone no longer depends on how many apps you have or how aesthetically you’ve arranged them. A phone with 50 apps feels just as responsive as one with 500 apps because you’re not scrolling through multiple screens anymore.
All you see on the home screen is your clock and widgets, if enabled. Apart from that, you swipe up to access an all-encompassing search bar, and swipe down to see your widgets.
The simplified interface has less processing overhead, which makes the launcher’s built-in animations feel fluid and responsive. Even on devices with more apps, the launcher maintains its speed because it’s not rendering dozens of app icons at once.
The app drawer also loads on demand, and widgets live in a separate pane accessible by swiping up from the home screen. This keeps your phone feeling responsive, and you might even notice slightly improved battery life.
A direct benefit of using Kvaestitso is that your phone feels far more responsive. Since the launcher doesn’t have to load multiple home screens full of themed icons, animations, or widgets, it’s noticeably faster than traditional launchers. If you’ve got an older or mid-range device collecting dust, installing Kvaesitso is a great way of reusing an old Android phone.
How Kvaesitso improves your phone
Cleaner navigation, fewer distractions, smoother use
Instead of the usual folders, the launcher uses a tag-based search approach that lets you organize your apps in multiple categories. For example, Instagram can be tagged as both a social media and a messaging app, and will appear for searches in both. This approach is far more flexible than folder-based systems and feels more natural when you’re looking for a specific app.
The search bar itself is quite powerful. Think of it as Spotlight search from macOS or the Command Palette from Windows. You can search for apps, emails, contacts, files, calendar events, YouTube, and Google Play, among others, make quick calculations and conversions, and more, all in one search bar.
This minimalism doesn’t come at the cost of customization either. You can choose from different clock styles, customize colors and themes, adjust icon sizes and shapes, control animations, and even create custom color schemes based on your phone’s wallpaper.
Also, while other launchers encourage you to spend time tweaking settings to get the best results, Kvaesitso is ready to go out of the box. You can make customizations if you want, but you’re not obligated to make them to get the most out of the launcher.
Installing Kvaesitso can be a tricky process
Android goes haywire when you try installing this app
The only catch you’ll face when using Kvaesitso is installing it. It’s not difficult if you’re familiar with sideloading apps on your Android phone. However, you can’t just download it from the Google Play Store.
According to Kvaesitso’s official GitHub repository, using the F-Droid app is the suggested way of installing the launcher. This way, you’ll always be notified of updates, but some features that require non-FOSS external APIs won’t work. To circumvent this, you can either add MM20’s repository to F-Droid or get the latest release from the GitHub repository and sideload the app manually.
Another issue you might run into when installing the app manually is that Google Play Protect may not allow the app on your phone. This is due to the sensitive permissions the app requires, and can be solved by temporarily disabling Play Protect.
I couldn’t find any evidence of data misuse from the app, so it should be safe to provide any permissions it needs. However, Android will actively stop you from trying to give the app permissions, and you’ll have to enable the Allow restricted settings access before the launcher can access more sensitive data like notifications and playback controls.
It’s a little off-putting at first, and might even discourage some from using the launcher in the first place. It is a one-time process, though, so at least you don’t have to deal with issues once you’ve enabled the required permissions.
Your slow, old Android can feel new again
The easiest way to revive a cluttered phone
If you’re getting tired of seeing a home screen full of digital clutter, Kvaesitso might just be the launcher for you. It can take even the most complicated Android phone and return a clean, minimalist device where everything is a swipe away.
There are other minimalist phone launchers that can stop you from doomscrolling, but they often overdo it, turning your phone into a terminal-like interface. Kvaesitso does that, and more, in a way that doesn’t make your phone like a terminal window from the 90s. Distraction-free and minimalist interfaces don’t have to look or feel bad to use, and this launcher proves it.