Orb Launcher (Experimental)

Your home screen, alive.

Orb is an Android launcher built around one breathing orb. It reacts to what your phone is doing in real time, and when you tap it, the apps you're about to need float up around it. Everything it learns stays on your phone.

An orb that reads the moment
• Battery low, it looks drained. Notifications piling up, it gets a heartbeat.
• Charging, a thread of light rises from the bottom of the screen.
• Music playing, a waveform wraps around it and it breathes with the tempo.
• Driving, stars stream out from behind it. Walking, it moves with your steps.
• Colours drift with the light in the room, the time of day and the weather. There's no dark mode switch to remember, and fixed themes are there if you prefer them.

The right apps, right now
Tap the orb and seven apps appear: the ones you're most likely to open next, based on the time, where you are, what's connected and your habits. It learns from every launch, so it gets sharper over the first week. Pin your favourites to keep them there.

Visions (beta)
Put up to nine of your photos inside the orb, veiled in liquid ink. Wake your phone and one rises to the surface. Shake it for the next one. Your photos never leave your phone.

A complete launcher
• App drawer with fast search, folders and recent apps
• Scribble search: draw a letter anywhere on the home screen to find an app
• Widget Cosmos: place widgets freely, anywhere on the screen
• Dock, icon packs and your own icon for any app
• Notification previews and media controls on the home screen
• Clock, date and weather at a glance
• Hidden apps, locked behind your fingerprint, face or PIN
• Work profile support
• App pairs for split screen, and shortcuts from other apps
• Your own photo or your wallpaper as the background, with a frosted app drawer
• Halo mode: a see-through orb that shows your wallpaper

Double tap to lock (beta, optional, off by default)
Double tap an empty part of the home screen to turn the screen off and lock your phone, like pressing the power button. Android doesn't let a home screen app lock the phone on its own, so when you switch this on, you choose one of two Android features:
• Accessibility: Orb uses Android's AccessibilityService API for this one action only, so fingerprint and face unlock keep working. The service asks Android for no screen content and no events: Orb can't see, read or tap anything on your screen through it, and it collects and shares no data.
• Device admin: Orb uses only the "lock the screen" policy. Your next unlock needs your PIN, pattern or password.
Before anything changes, Orb explains this and asks you to agree. Switch the feature off and Orb removes itself from Android's Accessibility and Device admin lists.
You'll find it during setup and in Settings → Beta & experimental.

Private by design
No ads. No account. No analytics, trackers or third-party SDKs. Predictions, places and usage history live in a local database on your phone, and uninstalling removes them. The only thing Orb sends anywhere is your location, to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute's free weather service (yr.no), for your forecast.

Good to know
• Needs Android 15 or newer.
• Every permission is optional and unlocks one feature. Skip location and you lose weather. The launcher works either way.
• The orb is animated, so it may use a little more battery than a static launcher. It quiets down in battery saver.
• Made by one developer in Denmark and updated often. Ideas and bugs go straight to me: hello@flocs.dev