Features

Features

A practical guide to what the launcher does and how to use it.

Home screen & dock

• Paged home screen with free icon placement — put icons anywhere on the grid, not just the next free slot.
• Drag and drop icons within a page, across pages (drag to the screen edge to flip), and between the home grid and the dock.
• Dock of favourite apps at the bottom. Drag apps in and out; long-press and drag sideways to reorder.
• Remove an item by dragging it up to the Remove pill at the top of the screen.
• Lock desktop — a toggle in Settings ▸ Home that prevents accidental moving, removing, or adding of items. Taps still launch apps.
• Pages appear when you drop an icon onto a new one, and an optional page indicator shows your position. The page menu (long-press the home background, 0.8.0+) adds a page to the left or right, sets the home page (its dot wears a ring; HOME returns there and the launcher opens there) and removes an empty page. Pages you add stay even while empty.

App drawer & universal search

Swipe up to open the drawer. The single search box finds:

• installed apps,
• common system settings pages — type "wifi", "battery", "bluetooth", … to jump straight to them,
• contacts (opt-in; needs the Read contacts permission),
• a calculator / unit converter — type 12*7 or 100 cm to in.

An optional most-used apps row can appear above the alphabetical list. You can also hide apps from the drawer and restore them later from settings. By default the drawer reopens scrolled back to the top on every open; turn off Settings ▸ Drawer ▸ Always open at top if you'd rather it remembers your last scroll position.

Widgets

• Add a widget from the empty-area menu (long-press the home background ▸ Widgets). The picker is a searchable gallery of large previews: drag a preview to the spot you want, or tap Add.
• Move a widget in one gesture: long-press it and keep dragging. Hold it at a screen edge to change pages, or drop it on Remove. Resize it by long-pressing without moving, then dragging the handles.
• Reconfigure widgets that support it. A widget can be resized up to the full width of the grid (edge to edge) with the side handles.
• The built-in clock, battery, notifications and people widgets adapt their layout to their size; Settings ▸ Home screen ▸ Themed backgrounds for built-in widgets switches them from the translucent style to theme colours.
• Collection widgets (chat lists, calendars, …) scroll in place.

Clock & calendar widget

The launcher also has its own built-in widget: a large clock, the date, your next alarm, the next calendar event (7-day lookahead) and the current weather with your locality (data by Open-Meteo).

• New installs get it automatically at the top of the first page; add it any time from the widget picker's ARK-launcher section.
• Long-press to move or resize — the content scales with the size.
• Tap the clock to open your clock app, the date to open the calendar, and the event to open it in your calendar app.
• The event row needs the Calendar permission and the weather a coarse location permission — both asked with a tap in the widget itself. The weather slot can be turned off in Settings ▸ Home ▸ Weather in the widget.
• The place name comes from your phone's own location service. Some phones have none; on those, Settings ▸ Home ▸ Place name from the internet (0.8.3+, off by default) looks it up from BigDataCloud instead.

People widget (0.8.0+)

A built-in widget (Widgets ▸ ARK-launcher ▸ People) that shows your messages, missed calls and mail grouped by person, across apps, as tiles. A tile is grey while quiet, takes the accent colour while something is unread (fading over two hours) and goes quiet again when dismissed; people you pin keep a tile even when quiet.

• Tap opens the newest message in its app. Swipe sideways dismisses everything behind the tile. Long-press offers open, reply from the tile, call, dismiss, contact, pin, and Link to a person… for merging a differently spelled name into the right tile.
• Other apps' notifications (news, deliveries, system) show as tiles grouped by app after the people; switch them off in Settings ▸ Home screen.
• Tiles pack into the widget's footprint; whatever doesn't fit folds into a "+N" tile. Stretch the widget to the whole grid for a tile-only page.
• Privacy (Settings ▸ Home screen ▸ People widget privacy): sender and message, sender only, or count only.
• Batch delivery (off by default): messages from people who aren't pinned wait in the launcher until the times you set (default 08:00, 12:00, 17:00). Only the launcher's tiles, dots and status bar wait; Android's shade, sounds and pop-ups work normally. Pinned people, missed calls and one-time codes come through at once, and turning batching off releases everything.

Needs notification access (the widget asks for it). Contacts are used only if contact search is already on. Everything stays on the device.

First-run setup

A fresh install starts with a short intro: set ARK-launcher as your default launcher, learn the core gestures and grant the permissions in one place (you can skip it — everything is still asked in context where it's needed). New installs also start with a ready-made dock: phone, messages, settings, browser and camera.

• Widgets are included in backups — see Backup & Restore.

Folders

• On the home screen: drop one app onto another to create a folder. Open it to rename, launch, or remove apps; drag a folder like any icon.
• In the app drawer: create drawer folders from Settings ▸ Drawer to group apps in the drawer itself.

Icons

• Third-party icon packs — apply an installed icon pack across home, dock, drawer and folders.
• Material You themed icons — monochrome, tinted to your system colours (on supported Android versions).
• App-label text size and colour, adjustable per your taste, and one- or two-line labels: a Two-line labels switch for the home screen (off by default) and one for the app drawer (on by default) lets long names wrap instead of being cut off (0.7.16+).
• Rename apps with custom labels, from the long-press menu.

Gestures

Configure these in Settings ▸ Gestures:

• Swipe up → open the app drawer.
• Swipe down → open the notification shade.
• Left-edge swipe → launch an app of your choice.
• Double-tap empty home-screen space → lock the screen (0.7.12+; uses a minimal accessibility service that reads nothing — enable it in the system accessibility settings).

Status bar (optional)

An optional themed status bar shows the clock, live indicators (Wi-Fi, mobile signal, Bluetooth, battery, alarm, Do-Not-Disturb, and more) and notification icons, with dynamic colours. Turn it on in Settings ▸ Home, and optionally hide the system status bar for a full-screen look. You can adjust the darkness of the bar's background.

Notifications

• Notification dots / badges on app icons — a plain dot or a Nova-style count. Needs notification access.
• A built-in notifications widget (one row per app, tap to open) and the People widget (by person, with optional batch delivery).

Customization summary

From Settings you can adjust: home / dock / drawer grid columns, labels (show/hide, one or two lines, size, colour), dock opacity, the page indicator, themed icons and icon packs, the status bar, gestures, notification style, the people widget's privacy and batch delivery, the home page, drawer search sources, and more.

Keeping up to date

Updates come from the GitHub Releases page — Settings ▸ Updates ▸ Check for updates opens it — or automatically through Obtainium with this repository as the source. (The in-app updater was removed in 0.7.12.)