TinyLaunch

Super-light launcher for limited devices and to hide apps from toddlers

This is a super-light launcher to give new life to old devices with limited memory, inspired by the PalmOS launcher. TinyLaunch is designed for one thing only: list and categorize apps (Games, Communication, etc.) and launch them. Everything extraneous to that purpose has been removed: no widgets, no shortcuts, no wallpaper and no home screen. Just a list of categories and your apps.

If you want to use even less memory, you can press MENU (or "..."), Settings, and remove the app icons.

To conserve memory, there are no instructions in the app. To create a new category, press MENU (or "...") and choose New Category. To move an app to a category, just long tap on the app. An app can be in more than one category. Three categories are special. UNCLASSIFIED lists apps that haven't been specifically put into a category. HIDDEN is for apps you want to exclude from the ALL category. And ALL lists all apps, except those that are HIDDEN. Finally, you can create a category named "Home" (capital-H, rest lowercase) and when you press the HOME button while in TinyLaunch, it will go to that category.

The toddler lock feature makes the hidden category completely invisible and disables editing. Turn this on with MENU (or three dots), Settings, Toddler mode. Once you've activated Toddler mode, you'll need to type in "not toddler" to a query screen in order to get back to the settings. I recommend using Toddler mode together with a restricted profile on Android versions that support restricted profiles, hiding the system settings and anything a toddler can spend money with. You should also make sure that the default launcher isn't accessible to the toddler with the multitasking key or long-tap on home (you may be able to swipe it out of the list).

In updates, the APK for this is guaranteed to stay under 40K and I will maintain compatibility back to Android 1.6. Full source code is available at code.google.com/p/tinylaunch