Text, not icons
Icons are designed to catch your eye. A word is just a word. Your apps become a quiet alphabetical list with a search bar on top, in black and white.
Minimalist launcher for AndroidReclaim your time. Spend it touching some grass.
Focus is a minimalist launcher: a home screen with nothing to look at. It replaces yours with plain text: no icons, no colour, no feed. Just the time, the few apps you chose, and an honest picture of where your day is going.
APK · 1.3 MB · version 1.0 · Android 8.0 or newer
Free. No account. No ads. No internet permission.
Limits that hold
Social media and games get a daily allowance. When it runs out, the app locks. You can still get in, but only after a pause, and only by saying so.
A weekly look back
Every Sunday evening, one screen: how long, which apps, what time of day, how often you pushed past a limit. Then a single question.
On the home screen
- The ring is your battery
- Tap it to open one app of your choice. Long-press to change which.
- One bar for the 24 hours of today
- The white part is the time you spent on your phone. Nothing else.
- Your next events
- From a single calendar you pick, with the emoji left out.
- Five apps, two corners
- The few you actually need, in words. Phone and camera in the corners.
Apps
Every app, one swipe away. None of them shouting.
- Search understands names, initials and typos. Swipe up from home and start typing.
- Anything installed in the last 24 hours sits on top, so new apps are never lost.
- Long-press an app to give it a timer, rename it, hide it, or pin it to your home screen.
- Apps with a daily limit show how much is left, right in the list.
App timers
When time is up, it is up.
- Social media and games are limited automatically: 30 minutes a day each, or whatever you set. Video apps can join them.
- Mail, browsers, messengers, maps and the phone are never limited unless you ask for it. Focus can tell a feed from a tool.
- On the lock screen, closing the app is the big button. Carrying on takes a five-second pause first.
- Ignored a limit for the day? Focus still asks before every single visit. Or switch both escape hatches off and make it strict.
Weekly review
See the week you actually had.
- Total time, daily average, and how it compares with the week before.
- A bar per day, and a bar per hour: not just how much, but when.
- Where it went, app by app, and whether each one is a morning or a midnight habit.
- It ends with one question, and one line you write for next week. You will see it again.
Minimalist launcher
What a minimalist launcher is, and what this one adds.
A minimalist launcher replaces the grid of colourful icons on your Android home screen with something calmer, usually a short list of app names. The idea is simple: when your phone stops advertising your apps to you, you open them on purpose instead of by reflex. People switch to one to cut their screen time, to make a smartphone behave more like a dumb phone, or simply to have a clean, distraction-free home screen.
Focus is a text-based launcher in that family, alongside Olauncher, Niagara, Before Launcher and minimalist phone. If you have tried one of those, you already know the feeling. Its own take comes down to three things:
- The app blocker is built in. Daily time limits are part of the launcher itself, so there is no second digital wellbeing app to install, configure or pay for.
- It shows you the truth. Your screen time sits on the home screen as one plain bar, and once a week it becomes a review you cannot scroll past.
- It cannot leak anything. No internet permission, no account, no ads, no subscription. The whole launcher is 1.3 MB.
1.3 MBThe whole app. No images, no icon packs, no libraries it does not need.
0 framesdrawn while nothing moves. It costs your battery nothing to sit there.
0 bytessent anywhere, ever. It has no permission to use the network.
2 coloursBlack on white, or white on black. Even emoji are left out.
Privacy
It cannot phone home.
Focus does not request Android's internet permission. That is not a promise, it is a property: the operating system itself will not let the app open a connection. There is no account, no analytics, no ads, no server. Your screen time is read from Android's own usage log and kept in the app's private storage on your phone.
It does need a few switches, and you should know exactly why:
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Home app | Being the screen you land on when you press Home. |
| Usage access | Counting screen time. The day bar, the timers and the weekly review all come from it. |
| Accessibility service | Locking an app while you are inside it. The service is told only the name of the app in front. It is declared unable to read window content, so it cannot see what is on your screen. |
| Notifications optional | One thing: telling you the weekly review is ready. |
| Calendar optional | Showing your next events on the home screen. |
Install
Three minutes, start to finish.
- Download the APK on your phone. focus-launcher-1.0.apk (1.3 MB).
- Open it. Android asks whether your browser may install apps: allow it, then tap Install. Play Protect may offer to scan the file first, which is normal for anything from outside the Play Store.
- Open “Focus Settings” and go to Setup. Three switches: default launcher, usage access, and the Focus app timers service. If that last switch is greyed out as a “restricted setting”, open the app's App info, tap the ⋮ menu, choose Allow restricted settings, and try again.
- Press Home. Swipe left for your apps. Long-press anything to change it.
To check your download, compare its SHA-256 with this one:c97b5fca2a88bfb58bb84a8c073506bfca869e8d88b6ae65534e090897e11c08
Changed your mind? Pick another launcher under Settings → Apps → Default apps → Home app, then uninstall Focus like any other app. Nothing is left behind.
Questions
Fair things to ask.
Is Focus free?
Yes. No price, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads. It could not show you an ad if it wanted to: it has no access to the network.
Which phones does it work on?
Anything running Android 8.0 or newer. It is developed and tested on a OnePlus phone with Android 16. Some manufacturers bury the “default home app” setting a little deeper than others, but every Android phone has it: Settings, then Apps, then Default apps.
How is this different from Android's own Digital Wellbeing?
Digital Wellbeing keeps its numbers in a settings screen you have to go looking for. Focus puts your screen time on the home screen, where you cannot avoid it; asks again before every extra visit to an app you have run out of time for; and once a week shows you the whole picture. It also replaces the icon grid, which is where most mindless opening starts.
Is it safe to install an APK from a website?
Be as careful as you would with any download. Here is what you can check yourself: the file's SHA-256 is printed above so you can confirm it was not altered; Android lists an app's permissions before and after install, and you will see that internet access is not among them; and Play Protect can scan the file when you open it.
Why does a launcher want an accessibility service?
Because Android gives apps no other way to notice that you have been in a game for thirty-one minutes and do something about it. The service listens for one kind of event, “a different window is in front”, and reads one thing from it: the app's name. Without the service Focus still works, and still refuses to open an app whose time is used up. It just cannot interrupt you once you are inside.
How does it know what counts as social media?
Not by trusting Android's label, which files mail, browsers and messengers under “social” too. Focus keeps its own list of feeds, social networks and dating apps; takes games from the Play Store's label; and for everything else Android calls social, asks the system a plain question: can this app open a web page, send a message, or make a call? If so it is a tool, and tools are never limited unless you say so. Anything it is unsure about is left alone and listed in settings for you to decide.
Will it drain my battery?
It is built not to. With the home screen showing and nothing moving, Focus draws zero frames and uses no measurable CPU. In the background nothing runs: no polling, no periodic jobs, one alarm a week. Pure black also switches OLED pixels off entirely.
Can I read the source code?
Yes, all of it is public on GitHub. You can check every claim on this page against the code, including the manifest that asks for no internet permission, and build the APK yourself if you would rather not trust a download.
Can I have my icons back?
Not here. That is the point. But Focus is just a launcher: your apps, their data and your old home screen are untouched, and switching back takes ten seconds.
What about apps in a work profile?
They appear in the list, marked “work”, and open normally. Android does not let any ordinary app read usage or calendars inside a managed work profile, so those are not counted or shown. Focus does not try to get around that.
Take your time back.
The grass is right outside.
Download Focus 1.0
APK · 1.3 MB · Android 8.0 or newer