v0.5.1

Eden 0.5.1

The first release driven by a bug report rather than a plan. Icon packs stop making the launcher
sit still on startup, folders stop being one-way, and the home page you picked is the one you
actually land on.

versionCode 6, minSdk 29, targetSdk 36. No native code, no network code.

---

Icon packs no longer make you wait

An app's own icon is cheap to load. A themed one is not: the pack's mapping file has to be parsed,
and every app the pack has no entry for gets a background, a mask and an overlay composed under and
over it. Eden used to do all of that before it would show you anything, so choosing a pack meant
choosing a launcher that paused on every start.

Now the home screen loads with the apps' own icons and the pack arrives on top of it, a few icons
at a time, starting with the ones you are looking at. The launcher is usable immediately and the
theming lands over it in waves.

Nothing about the result changes - the same packs, the same composition, the same rule that an icon
you picked by hand outranks the pack. Only the order changed. Switching packs in settings is faster
too: your apps' own icons are no longer thrown away and read back off the system to find out they
did not change.

If you use no icon pack and have set no icons of your own, none of this machinery runs at all.

Folders open both ways

Apps could be dropped into a folder and there was no gesture that took them out again. Holding an
icon inside an open folder now does what holding one anywhere else does:

• Move to drag it out - onto a page, into the dock, or onto Remove or Uninstall.
• Hold still for the menu - rename it, change its icon, open its app settings, uninstall it, or
  take it out of this folder, which puts it back on the page the folder is on.

A folder emptied this way deletes itself, the same as before.

Tap beside a folder to close it

Back still closes an open folder. This is a second way, on by default, and there is a switch under
Settings, Home screen if you would rather keep it off - while a folder is open, that tap closes the
folder instead of reaching the icon behind it.

Tapping the folder's own edge no longer launches whatever happened to be underneath, either.

Fixes

• The home page you chose is the one you get. Setting a page as home in overview stored the
  choice correctly, but the launcher asked which page that was before it had loaded any pages - so
  the answer was always "the first one". Every cold start opened on the leftmost page whatever you
  had picked.
• The house badge remembers. Re-opening overview cleared the mark from the page you had chosen,
  which made a setting that had worked look like one that had not.
• Dropping an icon where you picked it up leaves it there. It used to shove the icon one cell
  along, because the cell it came from still counted as taken by the icon being carried out of it.
• You can see where an icon is going to land. The target cell is marked while you drag, and
  marked differently when letting go would make a folder instead.

---

Thanks to Voidz for the report that most of this came out of.

Bugs, ideas, disagreements: debadityamalakar@gmail.com

Attach the log if something went wrong - Settings, Troubleshooting, Open the log, Share. It stays
on the device until you do.

v0.5.0

Eden 0.5.0

Widgets, at last - plus a switch for people who want less launcher rather than more, and a run of
fixes for things that were quietly wrong.

versionCode 5, minSdk 29, targetSdk 36. No native code, no network code.

---

Widgets

Deferred since Phase 2 and now hosted properly.

• Every widget your phone provides, grouped by the app it came from, each with a preview.
• Sizes in cells of your grid, not an assumed one. A provider only states its size in cells
  since Android 12; before that it states pixels, and Eden works back from that against the columns
  and rows you chose - so the same widget is 4x1 on one grid and 3x1 on another.
• Anything that cannot fit is shown but not offered. The alternative is walking you through a
  permission prompt and then admitting there was never anywhere to put it.
• Resize by dragging the handles, snapped to whole cells, and never over a neighbouring icon.
• Drag them between pages like anything else, and remove them the same way.

Widgets you placed before this release come back bound: the database has carried the columns for
them since the very first version.

Simple mode

One switch in settings turns Eden back into what it was at v0.2.0 - a home screen, a drawer,
wallpapers, and the settings for those. Icon packs, per-app icons, the long-press icon menu and the
way in to widgets are put away.

Nothing is deleted. Your renames, your chosen icons, your icon pack and your placed widgets all
stay exactly where they are and come straight back when you switch it off.

Two things it deliberately does not undo, because they are fixes and not features: the drawer still
notices apps being installed and removed, and the log is still reachable. A simpler launcher should
not also be a more broken one, or one you cannot file a bug against.

The home screen stops rotating

Locked to your device's natural orientation. A launcher that swings sideways because you put the
phone down at an angle is rarely what anyone wanted. Apps you open still rotate exactly as they did,
and there is a setting if you want the old behaviour back.

Deleting a page asks first

The X on an overview card used to destroy a page and everything on it on one tap. It now says how
many items are about to go and waits for an answer. An empty page still goes straight away - there
is nothing to lose and asking would be noise.

Fixes

• Apps in an open folder have their names back. The folder cell was being sized square from the
  workspace cell's width, which left no room for the label underneath. An open folder also stops
  opening at full height for three apps.
• No more blank tiles in the icon browser. Names a pack lists but does not ship are left out
  rather than offered - picking one used to set an empty icon on an app. Packs that keep their
  icons under mipmap rather than drawable now work at all, where before they showed nothing.
• Page dots are tappable. Tap one to go to that page, on the home screen and in the paged
  drawer.
• Pull the drawer down to close it. From the top of the list, drag down and let go - the same
  gesture that opened it, run backwards. A fast fling up the list will not trigger it.
• Deleting a page no longer strands folder contents. It used to remove the folder's own entry
  but leave everything that was inside it in the database forever, invisible. Existing strays are
  cleared automatically on the next launch.

New

• An About screen, in Settings, with the version to quote in a bug report and what Eden owes to
  AOSP.

---

Bugs, ideas, disagreements: debadityamalakar@gmail.com

Attach the log if something went wrong - Settings, Troubleshooting, Open the log, Share. It stays
on the device until you do.

v0.4.0

Eden 0.4.0

Icons are yours now. So is the wallpaper crop. And the drawer finally notices when you install
something.

Still a pre-release. It is a daily driver if you do not need widgets.

Icon packs

Any icon pack you have installed, chosen from a dropdown in Settings. Eden reads the pack the way
every other launcher does - appfilter.xml out of the pack's own APK - so packs written for Nova,
ADW, Go, Apex, or Lawnchair work here without being written for Eden.

There is no Android API for icon packs and never has been. They are a convention that grew out of
ADW fifteen years ago, and a pack announces itself with whichever theme action its author's
launcher of choice used. Eden checks all seven of the common ones, because checking only the
popular one silently loses packs you can see are installed.

• Packs that ship a background, mask, and overlay use them on apps they have no entry for, so a
  themed screen is themed all the way rather than two thirds of the way.
• Packs that do not ship those leave uncovered apps alone - which is where the next feature
  comes in.
• Switching packs takes effect when you return to the home screen. It does not wait for the
  launcher to be killed.

Any icon, for any app

Long-press an icon, Change the icon:

• Choose from the icon pack - the whole pack, in a searchable grid. This is the answer to an
  app your pack's author never heard of: go and find something in the pack that will do. Nova,
  Niagara, and Smart Launcher all have this, and a pack without it covers your popular apps and
  abandons the rest.
• Choose a picture - any image on the device. It is centre-cropped to a square and scaled to
  your grid's icon size, so a 16:9 photo loses its edges rather than its proportions.
• Use the default icon - always there once you have overridden one.

A picked icon beats the pack, and the pack beats the app's own. That order is the only one that
makes sense: choosing an icon for one app is a more specific instruction than choosing a pack for
all of them, and it should not quietly stop working because you changed packs.

Wallpapers you position yourself

Setting a photo as the wallpaper used to hand it to the system and let it decide the crop. On a
tall screen it decides badly, and there is no arguing with it afterwards.

Now there is a framing screen. The bright rectangle is the real shape of your display and exactly
what will be visible; the dimmed surround is what gets cut. Drag to move, pinch to zoom, and the
picture cannot be pulled far enough to leave a blank edge.

• Home screen, lock screen, or both - asked before it is set, because Android keeps them
  separate and people use them differently.
• Reframe without choosing again. Eden keeps its own copy of the picture, so next week you can
  adjust the crop without going back to the gallery to find the photo.
• Your picture gets a tile, like every live wallpaper does, so the picker shows what is set
  rather than a bare button. Reading the wallpaper back out of the system needs a storage
  permission a launcher has no business holding, so Eden remembers what it set instead.

Two resolutions are in play on purpose: what you drag around is a downsampled copy so panning stays
smooth on a slow phone, and what gets set is decoded again from the original at the region you
framed, so zooming in does not cost you the picture's detail.

The drawer keeps up

Install an app and it appears. Uninstall one and it goes, along with its home screen icon and, if
that empties a folder, the folder. Update one and its new icon shows.

Previously the drawer showed the app list as it stood when the launcher was last started, so a
newly installed app was missing until the launcher happened to be killed. Package changes arrive in
bursts - a restore, an install that pulls in three more - so the reload is coalesced: one rebuild
for the burst, and never one under your finger mid-drag.

An app that vanishes because its storage was unmounted is treated differently from one that was
uninstalled. Its icons stay put and come back with the card.

Page dots in the paged drawer

The horizontal drawer had no way to tell how many pages there were or which one you were on until
you hit the end. It has the same dots the home screen does now. Vertical mode does not, because
there is nothing to count.

A log you can actually read

Settings -> Troubleshooting -> Open the log. The last 48 hours of what Eden did, on screen,
with Share and Clear.

logcat is the obvious answer and it is not good enough. A launcher crash takes the home screen with
it, so your next move is a reboot, and a reboot is exactly what clears logcat. This writes the same
lines somewhere they survive, throws them away on a timer so it can never fill your storage, and
records the stack trace of a crash before the process dies.

Nothing leaves the phone unless you press Share.

Also

• Settings dropdowns have an accent border, so a control does not read as a heading.
• Uninstall works from the icon menu and from the drop target. It was silently doing nothing in
  0.3.0: Android has required REQUEST_DELETE_PACKAGES to launch the uninstaller since Android 8,
  and without it the intent is dropped with no exception and no log entry.

What is still missing

• Widgets are not hosted. Rows and ids are stored and shown as a placeholder tile, so nothing
  is lost.
• Icon shapes and adaptive-icon masking of your own.
• Pages cannot be reordered by dragging cards in overview; use the badges.
• No gestures beyond swipe-up, no notification dots.

Install

Download app-release.apk and sideload it. Allow installs from your browser or file manager, then
pick Eden the next time you press HOME.

Signed with a throwaway test key, not a real release key:

• Your device may warn about the installer source. Expected.
• A future release signed with a different key will not install over this one without uninstalling
  first, which clears your layout.

Installing over 0.3.0 keeps your layout, your wallpaper, and your renames.

Compatibility

Minimum	Android 10 (API 29)
Tested on	Galaxy M31, Android 16 (API 36)
ABIs	All - no native code, so one APK covers every device
Permissions	Query installed packages, set wallpaper, expand status bar, request package deletion. Record audio only if you turn the visualiser's real-audio mode on

Icon packs need no permission of their own. Reading another app's resources is something any app
may do; Eden only ever reads.

Licence

Eden is MIT. Parts are ported from AOSP Launcher3 and the AOSP wallpapers and remain Apache 2.0;
NOTICE names each file and what it came from. Eden shares no source files or git history with
those projects, but it is a derivative work and says so.

Bugs, ideas, disagreements: debadityamalakar@gmail.com

v0.3.0

Eden 0.3.0

Live wallpapers. Eleven of them, plus your own videos, and a picker that does not lose your place.

Still a pre-release. It is a daily driver if you do not need widgets.

The picker

Android's way of previewing a live wallpaper is to actually start it, in an activity that owns the
whole screen. Anything that steals focus while you are looking - a notification you tap, a
mis-tapped camera button, a call - drops you out with nothing selected, and on some skins drops you
out of the picker entirely. You start over.

Eden renders a frame offscreen and shows you a picture. Browsing costs nothing and cannot be
interrupted, because nothing is running. Only when you commit does the real thing start, through
the system's own one-tap confirmation. Then it takes you to the home screen, so you see what you
just chose.

Eleven live wallpapers

All rewritten in OpenGL ES 2.0 from the AOSP originals, which modern Android no longer ships - and
could not ship if it wanted to. They were RenderScript, deprecated in Android 12 and removed
outright from the Android Gradle plugin in 9.0. Nothing here is copied; NOTICE names each
original.

Phase Beam	Drifting beams of light over deep blue. The Android 4.x default
Noise Field	Particles carried by a slow current
Galaxy	A spiral turning above a starfield, with real differential rotation - the arms wind up
Holo Spiral	A tunnel of light spiralling away
Magic Smoke	Slow coloured smoke, curling
Nexus	Coloured pulses racing on black. Touch it and it answers
Fall	Leaves onto water, and the ripples where they land. Touch the water too
Grass	A meadow under your own sky, hour by hour. Stars only when it is actually night where you are
Polar Clock	The time, as six turning arcs
Walkaround	Tilt the phone to look around the ridges
Music Visualization	A spectrum that rises and falls

LivePicker and ImageWallpaper are not included because neither is a wallpaper - one is the
chooser app Eden replaces, the other is the system's static-image renderer.

Speed is adjustable, 25% to 200%, in settings. It applies to all of them.

Your own video as a wallpaper

Pick an MP4 and Eden converts it to 1080p at 24fps using the phone's hardware encoder, then loops
it. Sound is off by default and is a toggle in settings, not a reason to import the video again.

No FFmpeg. The maintained Android build of it was retired in January 2025, the builds that can
encode H.264 are GPL and would relicense this MIT app, and it would take the APK from under a
megabyte to tens of them - on a launcher built for 4 GB phones. The cost of that choice is real:
the platform decoder only handles what your device's codecs handle, so an exotic container may be
refused where FFmpeg would have coped.

The microphone question

Music Visualization asks you, before it is set, how it should react:

• Its own rhythm - no permission, nothing to be uneasy about, and most people cannot tell.
• Follow real audio - needs the record-audio permission.

It is worth being precise: that permission reads the sound your phone is playing, not your
microphone. It cannot hear the room. But Android asks with the same dialog and lights the same
indicator, so the choice is yours to make, and declining costs you the feature rather than the
wallpaper - it falls back to its own rhythm.

Icons answer to a long press

Hold an icon and its options appear. Move instead and it becomes the drag it always was; neither
gesture had to be given up for the other.

• Rename anything, on the home screen or in the drawer. Clearing the field puts the app's own
  name back. Search still matches the original name, so a rename can never lose you an app.
• Put in a new folder - you no longer need two icons you already want together just to make one.
• Uninstall, from the menu or by dragging to the top of the screen, where it now sits beside
  Remove.
• App settings, straight to the system page.

Icon packs are listed and greyed. They arrive in 0.4.0; a menu that silently omits them would leave
you guessing whether they exist.

Battery

• Nothing draws while hidden.
• The launcher explicitly pauses the wallpaper behind an opaque app drawer, where the system still
  considers it visible.
• The visualiser drops its audio capture the moment it is not being watched.
• 30fps, not 60. These are slow scenes; the difference is battery.

What is still missing

• Widgets are not hosted. Rows and ids are stored and shown as a placeholder tile, so nothing
  is lost.
• Icon packs and custom icons - next release.
• Pages cannot be reordered by dragging cards in overview; use the badges.
• No gestures beyond swipe-up, no notification dots.

Install

Download app-release.apk and sideload it. Allow installs from your browser or file manager, then
pick Eden the next time you press HOME.

Signed with a throwaway test key, not a real release key:

• Your device may warn about the installer source. Expected.
• A future release signed with a different key will not install over this one without uninstalling
  first, which clears your layout.

Installing over 0.2.0 keeps your layout. Reinstalling resets a live wallpaper back to the system
default - set it again from the picker.

Compatibility

Minimum	Android 10 (API 29)
Tested on	Galaxy M31, Android 16 (API 36)
ABIs	All - no native code, so one APK covers every device
Permissions	Query installed packages, set wallpaper, expand status bar, request package deletion. Record audio only if you turn the visualiser's real-audio mode on

Licence

Eden is MIT. Parts are ported from AOSP Launcher3 and the AOSP wallpapers and remain Apache 2.0;
NOTICE names each file and what it came from. Eden shares no source files or git history with
those projects, but it is a derivative work and says so.

Bugs, ideas, disagreements: debadityamalakar@gmail.com

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.3.0

v0.2.0

Eden 0.2.0

First public build. A Kotlin rewrite of AOSP Launcher3 for Android 10 and up, built around the
idea that the launcher should ask rather than assume.

It is usable as a daily driver if you do not need widgets.

What works

Home screen

• Swipeable pages with AOSP Launcher3's paging feel - the fling thresholds, the significant-move
  threshold, and the velocity-scaled snap duration are ported exactly
• Long-press empty space to zoom out into overview and manage pages as cards
• Pick any page as your home page with the house badge in overview. Keep the middle one as home
  and have pages on both sides. Back and HOME both return to it
• Empty pages stay empty. Eden does not delete a page just because you moved the last icon off
  it
• Add and remove pages from overview; page order and empty pages persist across reboots

App drawer

• Swipe up to open
• Two navigation styles, switchable in settings: continuous vertical grid, or fixed horizontal
  pages
• Search matches anywhere in the name, so "tube" finds "YouTube"
• Background opacity from 0 to 100%. The home screen fades out behind it, so a transparent drawer
  shows your wallpaper rather than your dock

Drag and drop

• Drag icons between pages and the dock, or onto the trailing empty page to start a new one
• Drop an icon on another icon to make a folder; open it, rename it, add and remove. A folder that
  loses its last item deletes itself
• Drag to the Remove bar at the top to take an icon off the home screen
• Drag to a screen edge to page across

Settings (Eden's own - no reliance on your OEM's Settings app)

• Drawer navigation style and background opacity
• Drawer columns, home grid columns and rows, dock icon count - each Auto or 3 to 8
• Icon size 60-140%, vertical and horizontal spacing, label gap

Other

• Accepts "add to home screen" requests from other apps
• Deep shortcuts launch correctly
• Work profile apps launch under the right user

What is missing

• Widgets are not hosted. Widget rows and their ids are stored and shown as a placeholder tile,
  so nothing is lost, but they do not render yet. Widget pin requests are declined rather than
  half-accepted
• Live wallpaper support is the next phase
• Pages cannot yet be reordered by dragging cards in overview; use the badges
• No icon packs, no gestures beyond swipe-up, no notification dots

Install

Download app-release.apk and sideload it. You will need to allow installs from your browser or
file manager, then pick Eden the next time you press HOME.

This build is signed with a throwaway test key, not a real release key. That means:

• Your device may warn about the installer source. That is expected
• A future release signed with a different key will not install over this one; you would have to
  uninstall first, which clears your layout

If that matters to you, wait for a build with a stable key.

Compatibility

Minimum	Android 10 (API 29)
Tested on	Galaxy M31, Android 16 (API 36)
Size	635 KB
ABIs	All - there is no native code in Eden, so one APK covers every device
Permissions	Query installed packages (to build the drawer), set wallpaper, expand status bar

Licence

Eden is MIT. Parts are ported from AOSP Launcher3 and remain Apache 2.0; NOTICE names each file
and the class it came from. Eden shares no source files or git history with Launcher3, but it is a
derivative work and says so.

Bugs, ideas, disagreements: debadityamalakar@gmail.com