There are a good many third party home launchers out there for Android, some of them simple and clean and others are fully customizable with tons of tweaks and options to make it just as personal and unique as you want it to be. Some stand out and have millions of users, like Apex Pro, Nova Prime, and even Yahoo’s Aviate, while newcomers like Nokia’s Z-Launcher are just starting to capture the attention of users. Most of the launchers out there keep things pretty uniform in the setup, giving you an app drawer with customizable icons, a homescreen where you can place your widgets and app shortcuts, and a dock for your most used apps. FlowHome is different in that it wants to bring the content from within apps to your homescreen, front and center, instead of the app icons or shortcuts themselves.
It takes things like content from inside your social feeds and places them on the homescreen alongside other things like your camera roll, your news from RSS feeds or apps like Flipboard, Play News Stand and others, and even your emails from whatever email client and inbox you use most. The idea behind FlowHome is to bring your content to you on the homescreen so you can see stuff at a glance, without having to open apps for certain stuff, although you can and still will have to open apps up for various tasks. FlowHome brings notifications and other information to the homescreen in a continuous scrolling “flow” like experience so you aren’t swiping through pages of different content. Everything appears as if it’s on one seamless page that continually refreshes with new content from inside your installed apps.
The launcher is in beta right now but you can still download and install it from the Play Store. To use it however you need to be a tester for the launcher as this is a closed beta. You can become a tester by following @flowhomeapp on Twitter, and downloading the app from the Play Store. Flow Home also gives you a smart integrated search to find other apps that may not be on your homescreen, and there is a tiny button in the right hand corner(they state that it’s right under your thumb for easy access)where you can access and launch your most used apps. We imagine that this button could be placed on either side of the homescreen so as to accommodate right or left handed people, but we don’t know for sure as we haven’t used it yet. It seems heavily tailored and focused on social media, so if you frequent apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Sound Cloud and others you’ll see things like this pop up in the flow of information that you can scroll through. It also seems like it would be great for any and all communication type apps like Hangouts, Groupme and other messaging apps. As you scroll through content on the homescreen you can read the snippets of information or tap on any of the tiles to access that apps content more in depth. It’s definitely different and seems like it’s worth a try.