Olauncher
An Android home launcher that replaces the icon grid with a short list of app names in plain text. "Minimal AF Launcher" — and the README's first line explains the joke: "AF stands for Ad-Free." Kotlin, GPL-3.0, on both F-Droid and the Play Store, plus APKs on GitHub releases.
3,803★ / 496 forks / 25 open issues, created 2020-07-10, last pushed 2026-09-01. Figures read 2026-09-10 from the GitHub API. T1 — the project's own repository.
The scale changes what this spoke can say about launchers
The corpus already holds two Android launchers, and both are terminals for experts: termux-launcher (239★) and its dormant ancestor tel-termux-expert-launcher (154★). Olauncher is fifteen times the larger of them, has run for six years, ships on the Play Store, and targets the opposite user — someone who wants fewer affordances, not a shell.
So "minimal Android launcher" is not one category. One branch removes the GUI and gives you a
command line; the other keeps the GUI and removes almost everything in it. They share a diagnosis —
the stock home screen is the problem — and disagree completely about the cure. Olauncher's own topics
name the goal the terminal launchers never claim: digital-wellbeing, reducing screen time.
Deliberately hidden features
One design decision worth recording, because it inverts the usual FOSS instinct:
"To maintain the simplicity of the launcher, a few niche features are available but hidden."
The features exist and the interface does not admit it; the full list lives in an About page and a Substack post rather than in the app. Configurability is treated as a cost to the default user rather than as a virtue, which is the opposite of how anysoftkeyboard and the terminal launchers present themselves.
The funding shape, and why it matters here
Olauncher is free and GPLv3. The same author sells Pro Launcher — "the Pro version of Olauncher with extra features like widgets, weather, folders" — on the Play Store, and there is no repository for it. Alongside that: a Buy Me a Coffee link asking for help "to get a new phone for testing", and two more apps (one open, one open under a different author).
That is open core run by one person, at the small end: the GPL app is complete and the paid one adds convenience, rather than the AGPL-plus-enterprise-tier pattern ever-gauzy shows at company scale. The spoke's growth edge 3 asks for a serious treatment of FOSS licensing in practice; this is not that source, but it is a clean specimen of the shape.
Single-maintainer, six years, 3,803★, no governance document, and a commercial sibling that depends on the free one's users. Growth edge 6 asks exactly this question and still has no source answering it — Olauncher is the corpus's best-documented instance of the risk, not an answer to it.
What is not here
No privacy claim is made or tested; no download figure independent of the Play Store listing; no contributor or release-cadence data read at ingest. The README is unusually thin — most of what a reader would want is behind an in-app About page and a Substack link.
Related
foss-application · termux-launcher · tel-termux-expert-launcher · f-droid · anysoftkeyboard · open-source-alternative · synthesis