Changing my phone use with KISS Launcher
As I posted about previously I use a Fairphone with /e/OS. /e/OS ships with Bliss Launcher as default, which I was never really happy with. The app organisation capabilities are quite limited and everything installed ends up on the home screen, leading me to create a convoluted category system to keep everything manageable.
When I saw a post about KISS Launcher[↗] on Hacker News I was immediately interested - it was the direct opposite of Bliss.
In KISS there are no apps on the home screen. There is a favourites bar at the bottom, but this only has space for about five apps (I assume, I limited myself to two: a password manager and a browser). All the other apps are behind a search input.
This might seem user unfriendly - having to type in a search query to find an app - but I got used to it very quickly and I find myself actually being able to open apps faster than with my previous apps-within-pages-within-folders solution in Bliss Launcher. There is a single entry point to all my apps now, and for a lot of them I only have to type one or two letters for it to come up. KISS also indexes which apps you opened for which search queries and orders them next time with the most common apps nearest the input, which results in tapping the closest result about 99% of the time.
Really the only stumbling block I had was trying to remember the name of certain apps that I'd always just opened based on icon colour. But conversely, the issue of opening apps by mistake because of their similar colour scheme is entirely eliminated.
What KISS Launcher does require to work well is your own memory. As I said, this can be a problem at first, but actually it is in my opinion KISS' main benefit. It is now much more difficult for me to just mindlessly open my phone and scan my apps for something to do. I used to have an Entertainment folder with games, social media and news apps that I would open whenever I had five minutes to spare. I admit, I still do reach for my phone in those situations, but now I no longer look at a list of options and pick one - I have to make a deliberate decision to open an app by typing its name. The result is that apps that I really don't need and therefore don't readily remember sink to the bottom of KISS' suggestions when I search. Things like the news and my RSS feed app suddenly get much more usage, while social media apps like Mastodon and YouTube (surprisingly) get far less screen time.
To be honest, the jury is still out whether this is actually an improvement of my phone use (my wife still thinks I use it far too much) but my feeling is that I am at least now more focussed on the apps I want to use than on the ones that grab my attention.