Introduction: How to Decorate and Simplify Android Using a Custom Launcher.

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About: Hello reader. My name is Steve and I live in the south east of England, U.K, and I have been a hobbyist for as long as I can remember. I've been making & tinkering with things ever since I was a kid, and many …

This Instructable is for Android phone and tablet users only as the launcher used here is not available for Apple iOS.

Hello dear reader. For those unfamiliar with the term, a phone or tablet launcher is the user interface software that controls the device's home screen, app drawer, and overall look and feel, basically it's the main screen/s on your device where you open your apps, see weather widgets etc.

If you ever fancied decorating your phones and tablets by making your very own custom user interface (UI) and wasn't sure how to do it, or felt it may be to difficult to do, then this Instructable is for you. Here I will guide you through the process to customise your phone/tablet to make it look the way you want, use your own colour schemes and design a layout that suits your wants and needs. Whether it's a slate, flip or folding phone or any size tablet (can also be done on Amazon Fire Tabs and on PCs, with some limitations: see Step 8), you can make your own Futuristic, humorous, Fandom, slick or outrageous UI designs. This is not just about how your device will look, but how it functions as well.

The Project:

The application I use and have used for many years now for my Android device launchers is called Total Launcher, and here I will guide you step by step to show you how to set it up, use it and show what all the things you can do with it to make your device truly unique and user friendly specific to you. I will show you how I use Total Launcher for use on my everyday phone, my Smart Table, and in my car using a full Android tablet instead of Android CarPlay devices which for me have unwanted limitations. I have composed this Instructable in an effort to hopefully inspire you and give you ideas to make your own. Some of the UI designs I have used in the past including a Star trek LCARS design I used on a wall mounted tablet and a Samsung Z Fold 4, can be found in Step 9 along with a couple of video demos. As I mentioned, although it is a big part of it, it's not all about looks, it's about how to use your device more effectively by using it differently that the standard out-of-the-box phone or tablet launchers. I control all of my smart home devices from a separate launcher window overlay, all windows are catogorised, and I use things like on-screen slider widgets for media volume and screen brightness and more (more about this in Step 1: Design).

The Inspiration:

I have always liked building, making, designing and modifying all kinds of things. I was also an iPhone user for around 12 years ever since the first one came out, but getting frustrated by the lack of customisation that could be done and discovering what could be done on Android devices, I made the change from iOS to Android and purchased my first Android phone. And after playing around with it and doing some research, it soon became clear that this was for me. I found apps like Tasker that opened up a whole new would for me, then soon discovered Total Launcher where thing went from great to even better. So I wanted to share what I have learned for those out there who either want to give it a go themselves but are unsure how, or for anyone who is just curious.

Lets get to it.

Supplies

  1. An Android device: phone, tablet, phablet, smart flip or foldable device.
  2. Total Launcher app: The app is free to download and has basic features. You can purchase an unlock key to get all of the features which is very cheap, and for the price you can add the full version on multiple devices, all set up the same of differently if you prefer.
  3. A PC with a draw/paint program: thing like MS Paint, Paint.net or any other program will do.

Optional:

  1. Websites to download audio tones (free or paid) or use Audacity to make your own, GIFs or a GIF maker app or website, applications with included widgets (Googlemaps, MET weather, Poweramp music player etc.), Still photos or images.
  2. If you intend to use an Amazon Fire tab, you'll need to install Google paly services. Follow the instructions found here.
  3. To run Total Launcher on a PC, you will need an Android emulator. I use Bluestacks for my Smart Table.

Note:

There are a number of different custom launcher apps available, and Total Launcher is the only one I have used so far. I don't say this lightly, but the all the time I have used this app, and on different devices, it is a solid app that has never crashed on me and only failed me once in 6 years at time of writing, and that was because it didn't save a backup properly, which may have been my fault. There was another time when GIFs were not playing properly, but that was because I got carried away and overloaded the device's RAM with multiple GIFs running on the same pages. After streamlining that design, the issue was resolved. All in all, Total Launcher is a solid platform.

Step 1: Coming Up With a Design:

As I mentioned, I have made a lot of different designs since I started using Total Launcher (which I will now refer to as 'TL'), and my latest one for my Motorola Rzar 50 Ultra* flip phone I wanted to make a two step design...

  1. A full-on portrait mode with all of the apps, smart home control dashboard, widgets and live information set out where I wanted it all,
  2. And then a simpler landscape design for 'driving mode' that would not clutter up the screen with things I wouldn't use while driving.

I also have a tablet in my car as well that used the same 'driving mode' design, but more on that later. I use my laptop to draw up the designs, making sure I use the correct resolution for the device they will be used on, button sizes that are not too big, not too small, and choose a typeface that suits the design yet easy to read.

Another thing I took into account was the fact that I wear reading glasses and I don't want to have to put my glasses on every time I want to see the phone screen, so choosing a font style and size was important.

Other design elements include making the different Windows or pages quicker to access. There are two ways to store app buttons, widgets and so on that won't fit all on the home page... 'Pages' and 'Window overlays'. Pages are like what your device already has where you swipe left or right from your home screen page. Window overlays work the same way but is all done on the home screen page (or other pages if you use more than one). These can be resized, relocated on the screen, and you can have more than one at the same time. I chose to use window overlays instead of pages, and I did this by making all of the launcher windows into categories such as

  1. Utilities 1,
  2. Utilities 2,
  3. Smart home dashboard,
  4. Media,
  5. E-commerce (shopping, delivery tracking etc.),
  6. Automation (smart home apps/Tasker etc.)
  7. and of course the Home page where the most used apps are located as well as buttons to open the other pages because I find opening a page with a button press is much quicker than swiping left and right to find the page I want. There is another way for quick access without swiping, and that is to open a 'window' within a page. This is like opening a smaller version of a page which holds buttons and widgets which I will explain later.

For the smart home control window, I didn't want to overfill the screen real-estate and cram it full of tiny On-Off buttons, so I used the available option of swiping a button up to turn something On, and swipe down to turn it Off. I will go into this further in Step 4. Also deciding what live information and widgets I wanted to use and where was an important factor to consider as some widgets can be resized and reconfigured, but some are not. Playing with all of these elements, then putting them roughly where I wanted them on the phone and taking a screenshot would help with the overall background design of the UI. When TL is downloaded, you can use it as a stand-alone app while you practice on it and set thing up, then when you have a finished UI, you can change the default launcher from the original one on the phone/tablet to TL.

For the car tablets UI, I wanted to add easy to use slider controls for media volume and screen brightness as well as larger buttons and font size that would be easy to see and control while driving.

So...

  1. As well as having a really cool looking UI (being inspired by Sci-Fi movies and TV shows), I was looking for easy of use and functionality.
  2. I used a paint program to trial, error and finalise the designs.
  3. I use button taps to open launcher pages instead of swiping.
  4. I can control all of my smart home devices directly from my Android devices without opening apps.
  5. I can see live system information without having to navigate through the device 'Settings' app.
  6. Have a 'Phone' mode (portrait) and a 'Car' mode (landscape).

So when designing your own launcher UI, take some time out to thing what is important to you, features you use more than others, easy to see, ease of use or anything else you can think of that will help you.

*Just to note that my Motorola Rzar 50 Ultra flip phones outer screen doesn't have Total Launcher support at time of writing this which is not a big deal and the TL developers are always making improvements and additions and adding support for different screen resolutions. TL has support for both the inner and outer screens on My Z Fold 4.

Step 2: Setting Up Total Launcher:

So before we start with any designs, lets get TL up and running and give ourselves a clean canvas to work with which gives us a starting point to lay out the elements we will use such as widgets, areas for buttons, bar graphs etc. This assumes that you have TL already downloaded and installed on your device. Also, there are two editors that will be used... A main edit option you toggle On and Off to edit your TL interface, and an element edit where you can change the properties of any buttons, widgets, images and so on.

For a phone, we will start by holding the phone in portrait mode.

  1. Open the Total Launcher app, then press and hold on an empty space until the page shrinks down. Click on 'Edit Off' to toggle it On.
  2. While the page is shrunk down, if you only want to use the one home page, swipe across to the others and tap the bin icon to delete the pages you don't want. If you want to use multiple pages and want to add some more, tap the "New Page" tab at the bottom of the screen.
  3. One by one, press and hold on all of the default elements on the screen and tap the delete bin icon to start with a blank canvas. On some of the default elements such as the app search widget, don't tap and hold on the app icons, but on a blank area nearby. This widget is a square with invisible/transparent areas which is where you need to tap and hold. The widget (and anything else you select) will then have a yellow chevron outline around it meaning the element editor is active. To turn the element editor off and save the changes you make, tap the 'Back' button of a blank area on the screen. NOTE: You can also press and hold on one element to highlight it, then tap on other elements to highlight them also, then delete them all at once.
  4. Swipe across the screen to the other pages and do the same. As I mentioned in Step 1: Design, I only use the home screen page on my phone (I use two pages on my car tablet), so instead of deleting all of the unwanted elements, I deleted the unwanted pages instead by tapping on the bin icon under each page.
  5. Final stage here is to now physically turn your phone in your hand into landscape mode, then follow the above stages from stage 2 as the editor will still be switched On.
  6. Press and hold on an empty screen space until the page shrinks down again, and while at this stage click on the middle square icon (looks like a little mountain) and click on the portrait image. Click on 'Colour' and then choose black with the transparency slider on the bottom of the slider bar. Then do the same for landscape.
  7. Click on the blank picture then select 'Stretch to fit screen' then name it "Home" or whatever you want. To add a second page to add more apps etc., swipe across the screen, make a new page, name it 'Page 2' and again set the landscape background to the colour black. Then click on it to bring the screen forward.

At this point you should now have a blank canvas to work with, with just your screen showing a default wallpaper. We will change this after we make our design in the next step.

One thing to note is if you choose to have more than one page, you can select which one is the home screen page. With the main screen shrunk down again, tap on the little house icon at the top of the launcher page, then click 'OK' to confirm.

You can also rename the pages by clicking on the cog icon then typing in the new 'Label' name then tapping 'OK'. It's a good idea to do this because it may come in useful when you set up your new launcher.

Step 3: Drawing the User Interface (UI):

So lets start making our designs. This is where we can have some fun a be creative by keeping the designs clean and simple, or be as extravagant as you like. I suggest keeping things simple to begin with then once you are more familiar with TL and what it has to offer, you can make more complex designs using all of the TL tools on offer.

There are two main ways to make your UI designs...

  1. Making a simple background using you paint program, then make separate buttons, add images and text etc. within Total Launcher.
  2. Making the background to include ready made buttons, text etc. in your draw/paint program. This technique is what I tend to use now as it is quicker to put together and what I will use as the example below.

If you think you will be moving things around after the you finished and are using your new setup, then the first option might be better for you. If you think you will stick with your design but just add new apps from time to time, or if your device has a low amount of RAM (say 3 to 4GB), then the second option may be better suited.

So lets begin.

  1. First off, add some widgets you think you will use and place them where you would like them. Tap the Plus icon (+) on the top right corner of the screen then tap 'Widget' and here you can choose pre-installed or app widgets. Using the Google calendar app, tap 'Application Widget' then tap on the Google calendar widget to add it to the screen. with the widget highlighted tap and hold the widget to move it around the screen, or tap/hold the sides to resize it (See Top Tips below).
  2. Take a screen shot of you devices screen and send it to your PC. We use this to make the UI the correct size/resolution for the phone or tablet.
  3. Open up a draw/paint program and open/insert the screen shot. Use the 'Crop' tool if needed so all that is on the drawing area is the screen shot. This will be for the home screen page.
  4. Fill the screen shot with a solid colour (for my phone I used black, and for my cars tablet I used a very dark blue), then draw your design. I started with the outlines then added buttons, leaving space to add the calendar and any other widgets I wanted.
  5. Now draw in some buttons or button areas. You will see in the above images that my phones home screen uses both buttons and button areas (the sphere and lines). Equally space and size them using the Copy/Paste tools.
  6. When you have your design finished, cover the widgets on the screen shot with black boxes or pen tools to hide them, as we will be filling the areas with the real things later.
  7. You can now add text to your buttons if you choose, or do that later in TL which is what I did.
  8. When you're finished, make a new folder in 'Pictures' on your PC, name it 'Phone UI' or whatever you like, save the background you made to the folder and name it 'Home Screen'. Now send the home screen picture you made to your phone or tablet.
  9. Press and hold on an empty screen space until the page shrinks down again, and while at this stage click on the middle square icon (looks like a little mountain) and click on the portrait image. Click on 'Image' > '+' (at the bottom right of the screen) > tap in the background image in your downloads or recent folder on your device then tap 'Select' to add it to your TL library, then tap on the background image again.
  10. Tap on 'Stretch to fit screen' then name it "Home" or whatever you want.

Now when you tap on the background image it will make it full screen and this is what you will see when you use the device. Tap and hold the widgets on your screen to highlight them and move/resize them into position if needed.

You can then follow the above process again to make and set the landscape orientation screen. This is where I set mine up different so my phone has a 'Driving Mode' for when I don't use the car tablet or use it for something else. This is a more minimalised screen with bigger text and buttons.

Top Tips:

To make simple designs I used MS Paint to draw them. But for more intricate shapes and colour gradients, I used Paint.net as it has more tools to use.

Widgets have different behaviour when you reconfigure or resize them. For example, resizing the Google calendar widget too small will cut off some of the information/dates, so play about with this before committing to a final design.

And be prepared to go back to your paint program and make some adjustments to your design if you find things don't fit properly of buttons are too small. It's better to dial in the overall design earlier rather than later on.

When making your designs, you probably will want to future-proof it a little. By this I mean adding some spare buttons for when you install new apps. I did mine mainly in the window overlays as the home screen is set up how i like it, although i can also make some small changes if i needed to such as using one button to do more than one thing, or making slight changes to the UI background on my PC and setting that up in TL. You can also make a new window to add further apps and features without changing your original design layout (see Step 7).

Step 4: Making Your First Touchscreen Button:

Before we crack on with setting up the launcher UI, I suggest taking a look at the Total Launcher User Guide which will tell you all you need to know about what you can do. The first two images I made show what the main controls are on the launcher interface.

So there are two main elements we can use for custom buttons, 'Image' and 'Text' (although pretty much any element can be used as a button). One button can have five operations by a single tap and swipe up, down left and right. so essentially you could open five different apps for example. As an example, for my smart home controls, for my over-head kitchen light i can swipe the button up to turn the light on to cool white, swipe down for warm white and tap the button to open the smart light s app. And for my under counter lights I can swipe up to turn them On, swipe down to turn them Off, and again tap to open the smart switch app. As we have made buttons on our background design, here we use the 'Text' element.

  1. Click on the top right Plus icon, select 'Graphic' > 'Text' > 'Default' then drag it over to one of your background buttons you made. Resize it to fit over your button the click the cog icon at the top of the screen. Here you can name it to the app of your choice, change typeface, text colour and size, alignment and more, then finish off by saving your changes.
  2. Now click on the Play icon. Here you click on 'Action' and then 'Application' and choose the app you want the button to open such as maps etc.
  3. This is also where you can add audio feedback so when you tap a button a sound of your choice will be heard. Download or file transfer some sound effects to the tablet, then tap on 'Sound' then the plus icon. Choose the sound effect saved on your tablet, then find and tap on it again, then het the back button a couple of times to exit the editor. Now when you press that button you will hear the sound.
  4. You can also animate how the apps open by tapping 'Launch Animation' and select the one you want from the available list.
  5. When you have finished adding the action and the optional sounds and animations, tap the back button once to get back to the screen, then tap back again to exit the element editor. You can now use your button.

Follow the above process to add more buttons, or when the button is highlighted, tap the 'Copy' icon (to the left of the scissors 'Cut' icon), then tap the '+' icon then tap 'Paste'. Then you can edit this button by moving it and adding a new action, sounds etc.

Top Tips:

There are a number of website that offer free and paid sound effects that you can preview, download then use in TL for your button taps and swipes. You can also use audio editors/creator programs such as Audacity to make your own sound effects. Do a web or YouTube search to find out how.

If you have a few buttons, you can tap and hold one, then tap on some others, then you can bulk copy and paste to save some time instead of adding and setting up new buttons individually.

Something else to note, you don't have to be stuck with the included text fonts in TL. On your device, do web search for reputable sites that offer free or paid typefaces and fonts, find one you like, download it, go to your downloads folder and extract everything. Now in TL, tap and hold on a text element to highlight it, tap the cog icon, tap 'Typeface', then the '+' icon at the bottom of the screen and select the new font you downloaded and extracted. Now with the new font on your TL library, tap on the new font to select it.

While in the same cog window, you can also select a 'colour when pressed' so when you tap a button, the text will briefly change colour as a confirmation that the button has been pressed.

The text element is essentially a square button, visible text with a transparent background. While in the cog menu you can change this so the box becomes visible by changing the 'Background' colour as well as the transparency level if you desire.

One more thing, the text element can also be dynamic, meaning that instead of plain text, it can also do things like display the time and date, weather conditions and live information about your device such as available RAM, storage, battery level and a lot more. Tap the cog icon then 'Text' then scroll down the list and choose what you want displayed. You can change certain thing like 12 or 24 hour clock... lower case hh is 12 hour and upper case HH is 24 hour. And you can also change the date format. As default the date will be displayed as 'Month Day Year'... MMMM d, yyyy. You can change these around to d MMMM yyyy or change the name of the month to the number of the month (e.g MMMM = December, MM = 12). Have a play around and if you get something wrong, you can always delete the element then add it again.

Step 5: Adding Widgets:

We have already covered the basic about adding a widget to your home screen at the start of Step 3, tap '+' > 'Widget' > choose the widget you want > tap back button twice, but I wanted to add some further information.

TL comes with some widgets pre-installed which can be very useful. These can be reconfigured by changing their size, colours and in some cases, what they do. An example of this is when you add a slider and when it is highlighted you can tap the cog icon, then 'Control' and choose what the slider controls such as screen brightness, media volume ring volume etc.

You can also add an app draw and reconfigure this, changing the app icons, amount of columns and rows and how the draw functions.

3rd party apps will have their own configuration tools and some will not have any, so in the world of widgets it can be a little hit or miss when it comes to function and if apps actually have any useful widgets at all.

Step 6: Making/adding GIFs & Animations:

I have called this step GIFs and Animations because although by definition GIFs are animated, there are animations you can add to the launcher where you can have a home screen page or app open up by sliding in from the right, left, bottom or top of the screen.

GIFs:

Before we go any further, I should mention about your devices RAM size and the amount of GIFs used in TL. For seamless animations you will need a device with at least 4GB of RAM, and then don't add to many GIFs as the animations will become choppy and slow your device down a little. My tablet has 4GB RAM and with a handful of high quality GIFs, it runs really well, and my phone has 12GB RAM and has a few more 33fps GIFs it runs flawlessly.

Apart from making your screen look cool, GIFs can be used as buttons too, for example tapping on the rotating car GIF I have on my tablet opens up an OBD2 car diagnostics app. Tapping the spinning orb on my home screen activates the digital assistant Gemini. Do this by tapping '+' > 'Graphic' > 'Image' > 'Default' > 'Image' > then choose your GIF to add you your UI. Then tap the play icon and 'Action' then choose your app or whatever you want to open/start.

You can also add GIFs as a background if you wanted to be a little more creative. For the rotating car, I used Canva's AI video generation tool, wrote a prompt with something like "Make me a video of a black hatchback car on a turntable, and have the car rotate 360 degrees. There should also be a black background". Then I used Ezgif to convert the MP4 video into a GIF then added it to TL.

To make a GIF to add to your screen, you have a few options. One is to make your own by drawing frames and then use a GIF maker app to put all of your frames together. Check out Step 6 in my AI Holo display project that explains the process more. Another option is to take a screen recording of a video, record what you want, then use a tool like Ezgif (free at time of writing) to convert the video into a GIF. Or do a web search fo find free and paid for GIFs ready to download and use.

You can resize any GIFs you add to your UI and move them anywhere you want. You can also use transparent GIFs (a moving image with invisible background) which is a great option if you want to layer it over another image like I did with my weather display.

Animations:

You can add animations to elements, pages and windows with different enter and exit effects. You can do this when editing elements like buttons and text using the play icon, or when pressing a black area on a window and tapping on the cog icon then swiping left to 'Animation'. There are further animation settings when you tap and hold an empty area on your home screen page, and when it shrinks down tap 'Menu' then 'Launcher options'. You will see an option called 'UI & Animation' and when you scroll to the bottom, you will see options for page transitions and sliding draws.

There is a different type of animation that can be used, and that is 'Dynamic Images'. These are for things like battery meters, signal graphs, weather graphics etc. Tap on the '+' icon > 'Graphic' > 'Image' > 'Default' > then you will see the 'Dynamic Image' selection which is where you select your images from. To make your own, draw or download images that are slightly different from each other, for example draw 5 images of a battery a with 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 5% written inside.

Tap and hold an empty area of the home screen, and with the editor On, tap 'Menu' > 'Launcher Options' > 'Resources' > 'Dynamic Images' > '+' > then tap on the drop-down menu next to 'Type' and select 'Battery Status'. You will then see a list of different percentages for the battery, so tap on the correct percentage then 'Image' then the plus icon at the bottom of the screen. Tap on the correct image to add it to your TL library (while you are here you can add all of the images you made), then tap in the correct percentage image. Follow the same process to add the rest of the images. When you are finished, tap 'OK' then back out of the editor back to your home screen, then when you tap '+' icon > 'Graphic' > 'Image' > 'Default' > then you will see the 'Dynamic Image' you will now see your new dynamic image. Tap on it to add it to your screen. You can also add icons, colours, GIFs and shapes instead of images.

Step 7: Adding Window Overlays:

I mentioned about making spare buttons at the end of Step 3 just incase you wish to add website links, apps and other things. But with Total Launcher, you can also add overlay windows which you can resize, add backgrounds and add anything you like. It is like an extension to your main page and using one of your home screen buttons, you can use this to open the additional overlay window to access your additional content without having to swipe across multiple pages. To do this...

  1. Click and hold on a blank area of the main TL page > 'Menu' > 'Launcher options' > 'Resources' > 'Window' > '+ (plus icon)' > Name your window then click 'OK' > click the 'Back' icon (near top left corner) three times > click anywhere on the main page > '+' (top right corner) > 'Graphic' > then click on any element you want, here I will use 'Text' as an example.
  2. After you tapped 'Text' > tap 'Default' > 'Play icon' > 'Action' > 'Window' > click on your new window name > then click the 'Back' icon > then the 'Cog' icon > then name and edit your text element > then 'Back' icon twice.
  3. Now click on the text element > Click and hold on the blank window > click on any of the blue simi circles and drag to resize the window > click the 'Cog' icon > 'Background' > 'Image' > choose your background > 'Back' icon > then click anywhere on the main page, not the window > the click the '+ (plus icon)' in the top right corner to start adding elements like additional buttons, widgets etc.
  4. To make a custom background to match the main UI, follow the instructions in Step 3, but when you have resized the new window to the size you want, take a screen shot of the UI with the window open, then open the screen shot in your paint program and crop just the window. Then you can design it as you want, save import and add it as a background to the new window. Edit the window's settings to add enter and exit animations, sounds etc.

Like I mentioned previously, I made all of my windows so they are in categories making it easier to find the apps etc. These are also the areas where I leave some blank buttons for any new apps of features I might add in the future. If you do fill up all of your buttons, you could always make a new window.

Step 8: Amazon Fire Tablets and PC Android Emulators:

If you intend to use a Fire tab, you'll need to install Google paly services. Follow the instructions found here and you should be good to go. Not an overly difficult task if you follow the directions exactly as written. There are some limitations though such as some apps may not be available to install, and as I found out recently on a 12h gen Fire Tab 8, you can no longer set TL as the default launcher as Amazon have removed this option, but you can still use TL and have it do pretty much everything, but it has to be run as an app so if you tap the tablets home button, it'll take you to the Amazon OS launcher home screen, not TL.

The same thing can be said if you want to run TL on a Windows PC using an Android emulator. I do this on my Smart Coffee Table where I run both Windows and Android using Bluestacks Android Emulator on the same machine. Again it works really well, but again there are a handful of limitations like some apps are not available to install or having TL read some of the live device data. Using TL on my table was a big deal because of the useability and the overall design which was a lot of work, but well worth it.

Step 9: Conclusion:

Above are some screen shots of the different UI designs I made and used on different devices over the years using Total Launcher. In fact, wanting to have a custom smart home dashboard, and wanting to use the Star Trek LCARS design was the inspiration for customising my Android devices to this extent and the main reason from switching from iOS to Android. I made my LCARS designs by following reference material and using paint.net as there were more options to make the correct shapes, and got the sound effects from here which are free to use. There are also a couple of videos of my smart home dashboard tablet using Total Launcher when I first set it up. In the video I am holding the tablet, but it is now wall mounted and used every day.

Feel free to download and use any of the designs above, just insert the images into your paint program and remove what you don't need.

The tablet in my car works well using TL with big buttons that are easy to see and use which doubles up as a digital rear view mirror using Wi-Fi dash cams. And when I want to use the tablet just as a rear view mirror, having the same TL UI layout on my phone is very helpful.

And I would never go back to using standard out-of-the-box launchers anymore. I will say this though, once you have your new setup up and running, it will take a little time getting used to where you put things, but it only takes a short while before you get used to the layout, just like anything else new really.

So I hope you found this Instructable useful and informative, and if you have any questions or if you decide to make your own UI designs, please leave a comment. In my next Instructable, I will go through how I set up my smart home dashboard, and will link to it here.

Thanks for reading, and happy making.