For those that love to customize their Android experience, there’s a brand new application in the Google Play Store that aims to minimize the space multiple apps take up on the home screen using Android’s shortcuts feature. For those that aren’t aware, app shortcuts were introduced with Android 7.0 Nougat. They allow contextually relevant actions through a long press on a given icon. For example, long-pressing the Gmail icon on the home screen allows a user to quickly compose an email without going through the extra clicks required by opening the app and navigating to compose. The new app, called Super Shortcut, was obviously created with screen minimalists in mind and allows for multiple apps to be launched through a shortcut action from behind a single icon. The big draw is that it takes up far less screen real estate than a folder when opened.
Among the best features of Super Shortcut is that it will intelligently select app shortcuts from the most used apps by default. Users can swipe up on the “confirm button” in the app itself to see which apps were auto-selected and adjust as necessary to suit their individual needs. Aside from that, as alluded to above, it allows those users who enjoy a bit less clutter to remove all other shortcuts from their screens. Using Super Shortcut is straightforward and should be intuitive to anybody accustomed to tweaking their own user interface. To place the Super Shortcut icon on the home screen, users will need to open Super Shortcut and confirm the selected apps. That will create the super shortcut itself, which will appear in the app drawer. That can then be moved to the home screen.
There are one or two caveats for Super Shortcuts, as per the app description in the Play Store. For example, some home launchers don’t allow for more than a preselected number of popup shortcuts to be shown with the shortcuts action. Super Shortcuts displays that number at the top of the screen, inside the app. App Shortcuts are also only allowed to be accessed via whichever launcher is set to default by the Android OS itself. So, if users have more than one launcher installed, Super Shortcuts will really only work for whichever launcher has been set to default. The app is available now in the Play Store via the button below.
