ZFL Launcher

Zero-Fee Launcher A free, open-source Android launcher with an elegant, iOS-inspired home screen.
Frosted glass, soft corners, and room to make it yours. No ads. No tracking.

A familiar frustration

You find an iOS-style launcher that looks beautiful in screenshots. You install it, arrange your apps, and try to settle in. Then come the ads, the awkward workarounds, the glitches, and the crashes. It works—until it doesn't. Sound familiar?

ZFL started with that same frustration. Built by someone tired of the same things you are, it aims to make a beautiful home screen feel like a comfortable part of your phone. A launcher is something you use every day; it should be dependable, pleasant, and leave you alone to enjoy it.

ZFL stands for Zero-Fee Launcher. Free to use, open to explore, and built without ads or trackers. It brings the visual character of iOS to your Android home screen: translucent glass, softly rounded icons, and familiar ways to organize your apps.

The project is still in early development. There is more to polish, and reliability is a goal we keep working toward.

Make yourself at home

• A softer look. Frosted glass surfaces, rounded icons, and a translucent dock give your wallpaper room to shine.
• Your own arrangement. Move apps between pages, keep favorites in the dock, and bring related apps together in folders.
• Apps within reach. Find an app through home screen search or browse the App Library when you want to see everything.
• Useful little details. Add clocks, calendars, photos, weather, or widgets from your installed apps.
• Personal touches. Customize icons, labels, and page transitions to make the home screen feel like yours.

On a real phone

Captured on a POCO X5

Home screen	Today widgets	App Library
Folders	Widget gallery	Make it yours

Explore the full screenshot gallery for search, menus, editing, widget sizes, and settings.

Page transitions

Five ways to move between your home screen pages, recorded on the same phone.

Default	Rotation	Flip	Zoom In	Alpha

Watch the 60 fps videos for smoother playback.

Gestures and Home

Open Settings → Gestures and Home. Swipe up, swipe down, double tap on empty space and pressing Home again each have a saved assignment. Choose no action, Search, App Library, an installed app (activity and profile), or Settings. Repeat Home also offers Main home page. App Library is offered only while its page is enabled; disabling the page later preserves its assignment and shows it as unavailable. It does not enable itself again.

Setting	Default
Swipe down	Search
Swipe up / empty-space double tap	No action
Repeat Home	Main home page
Return from a launched app	Keep the current page
Main home page	First home page
Today / launcher haptics	Enabled

Reset on this settings screen restores these defaults. Existing search direction settings migrate once: Down assigns Search only to swipe down, Up only to swipe up, Disabled to neither. The older swipe-down boolean is honored when no valid direction was saved. New assignment keys win, including unknown values (which safely behave as No action). Legacy keys are removed after migration.

Home closes the top menu, dialog, editor, search, folder or edit mode before any Repeat Home action can run. A separate Home press on the exposed desktop runs the assignment once. No action leaves the page as it is. Return navigation and the existing return animation are separate from Repeat Home: returning from a launched app follows the chosen return policy; Settings and permission-screen resumes do not become repeat presses. A background HOME Intent also follows the return policy.

The main page is a home-page ordinal, independent of Today and the library. If that page disappears, its ordinal is clamped to the nearest existing home page (or the first if none remain). This does not reorder apps or save the layout while paging. Hiding Today removes its UI from the pager while preserving its saved widgets, photos and hosted widget IDs, including stack contents. Re-enabling it restores them. Disabling a page while viewing it selects the main home page.

Input priority	Owner
Open overlay/editor, active drag, edit mode	Existing local interaction; global assignments disabled
Horizontal axis after touch slop	Home pager
Vertical gesture on scrollable hosted content	The widget
Other vertical gesture on a Smart Stack, including its edges	The stack
Remaining vertical page gesture	Assigned swipe
Double tap outside all occupied grid spans	Empty-space assignment

The swipe region remains the home page, including icons where the child does not consume the drag. An axis locks after system touch slop. After crossing the existing swipe threshold, an action runs once on release; consumed sequences, extra fingers, cancellation, focus loss and removal of the handler invalidate it. An ordinary app tap does not wait for a double-tap timeout.

App targets retain the exact component and profile, never a label or arbitrary Intent URI. Missing apps and unavailable profiles do nothing; the assignment stays visible and can be replaced or reset. Targets are checked again by LauncherApps before launch. Haptics controls ZFL's lift, tick, threshold and switch feedback, including the long press created by its widget host; platform haptic preferences still apply. It does not control vibration inside another app or widget.

Island

Settings → Island enables an optional music capsule above other apps. It is off on fresh installs and updates. Grant Display over other apps and Notification access for music using the buttons on that page. Returning from a permission screen rechecks the actual grants; leaving or cancelling the screen grants nothing. The music button opens Android's special notification-access list. On Android 13+ an APK installation can additionally be blocked by Restricted Settings; this must be allowed in the system's app information UI before notification access can be enabled. ZFL cannot grant this access itself. Charging events also require the music listener to be connected.

The system-bound IslandListenerService owns a single TYPE_APPLICATION_OVERLAY window, independently of Home. No foreground service or background Activity launch keeps it alive. With Island off, it has no media subscriptions, receivers or window. The system and OEM control listener binding; force-stop and battery restrictions are respected, so automatic startup is not guaranteed.

Compatible platform MediaSessions provide the artwork, title, artist, playback state and supported play/pause/previous/next controls. Sessions retain their token identity, including multiple sessions from one player. Playing sessions take priority; within a priority the current session is retained. Paused music remains for 30 seconds. Tap the capsule to expand; use the collapse button or wait 12 seconds. Seek is enabled only with a known position, duration and seek action. Otherwise a known position is an indicator. Tapping the artwork/title opens the player only when its session provides an Activity PendingIntent; Android launch restrictions still apply, and a platform-blocked launch may not report a failure to ZFL.

Optional charging indication shows a new unplugged-to-plugged transition for four seconds. The initial battery snapshot is a baseline, and repeated broadcasts do not extend it. Charging cannot interrupt expanded music controls. Screen off, Keyguard, disabled settings and revoked access remove the window and cancel delayed presentation. Unlock starts compact with live data. Runtime data is not saved.

The window stays below the status bar/cutout, leaves other apps focused, and uses only the bounds of the capsule/card. Collapse is explicit or timed; there is no full-screen outside-touch catcher. Landscape uses the compact presentation; insufficient space hides Island. Apps that hide overlays and protected system surfaces remain outside its control.

Island reuses ZFL's glass contour and highlight with a readable translucent dark body. It does not sample wallpaper or capture/blur another app. Artwork is limited to an owned 192-pixel thumbnail (at most 144 KiB of ARGB pixels), decoded off the main thread from session bitmaps; artwork URIs are never loaded. Only visible, expanded progress ticks at 1 Hz while playback advances. No sensor or animation loop runs in a settled capsule.

The first implementation has JVM policy/regression coverage, but its Android window lifecycle, player interoperability, touch behavior, morph appearance and idle/frame performance still require validation on a connected device. It does not integrate calls, messages, navigation, third-party timers or other notifications.

Privacy comes with it

No advertising SDKs, trackers, analytics, crash reporters, Firebase, or Google Play Services. Your layout and settings are stored on your phone.

The optional weather feature uses Open-Meteo for city searches and forecasts, sending the city query or forecast coordinates needed for those requests. It needs no account or API key. Choosing Current Location requires approximate location access; you can choose a city manually instead. Web searches open in an external app.

On Android 13+, wallpaper blur needs All files access to read the wallpaper bitmap. ZFL uses that permission only for the wallpaper; it does not scan, read, or write your personal files. Without it, glass surfaces use a translucent tint. Calendar access is requested when you choose to show upcoming events in a widget. Island's optional notification access is used only to query/control MediaSessions; notification delivery types are filtered out and ordinary notification payloads are not read. It stores no tracks, session tokens, PendingIntents or artwork, and does not use the network. Overlay access is used only for the Island window.

Try it

ZFL runs on Android 12 or newer. To build it, use JDK 17 and the Android SDK, or open the project in Android Studio. With your Android device connected, run:

./gradlew :app:installDebug

Press Home and choose ZFL Launcher as your home app.

Build modes

• ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug keeps debugging and Compose tooling available, skips R8, resource shrinking, and PNG crunching. Gradle caches task outputs and configuration for repeated builds; avoid clean during normal development.
• ./gradlew :app:assembleRelease enables R8 full mode with strict keep rules, code shrinking, obfuscation, optimization, integrated resource shrinking, and PNG crunching. Classes may be repackaged and access widened for optimization. Release also removes Kotlin Intrinsics null checks: invalid nulls passed from Java/platform code may fail later, or no longer fail at the original boundary. Debug retains those checks. See the R8 global options.

The R8 modes above are already defaults in AGP 9.4; the project pins them explicitly. Dependency keep rules and release stack-trace mapping are retained. The release APK currently uses the development debug signing key.

Gradle uses up to two workers and the Kotlin daemon has a 1 GiB heap limit to bound memory use. On a larger machine, override these in your user-level ~/.gradle/gradle.properties or use --max-workers=4.

Help shape ZFL

Bug reports, thoughtful suggestions, translations, and pull requests are welcome. If something feels awkward or breaks in everyday use, that is worth fixing.

For code contributions, keep comments and identifiers in English and put interface text in res/values/strings.xml, with translations in values-xx/. Preserve the project's privacy principles: contributions adding ads, analytics, or trackers will not be accepted.

License

ZFL Launcher is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).