---
title: "I wrote my own Android home screen: a list, three cards and a terminal into the homelab"
language: en
topics: ["Freedom", "android", "design", "minimal", "programming", "smartphone"]
full_article_url: https://willem.com/en/2026-08-31_my-own-custom-android/
---
# I wrote my own Android home screen: a list, three cards and a terminal into the homelab

*If your home screen is somebody else's idea of what you need, know that it is just an app.*

> In August 2026 I replaced the launcher on my Fairphone 5 with one I wrote myself, for one user: no app store, no onboarding, no settings menu for people who are not me. Built in a day, improved every week since.

It works because it does less: a list of the things I actually open, three cards with what I want to see at a glance, and a terminal that opens straight into the machine in the homelab.
Two weeks of Android only brought friction too, and I kept the honest balance in the post. But the phone became malleable, and that is worth more to me than polish.
In principle everything now works, smartphone only, which I would have called unimaginable a year ago. A home screen is just an app, you can write your own.