Building An Android Launcher Designed To Be Senior-Friendly

FlutterAndroidApp

May 09, 2023

1. Background

The smartphone is a necessity for us nowadays, and there are a great number of useful apps that make our lives more convenient. But, a group of people is overlooked, yes, the seniors. They always run to the wall when using it due to dialogues, advertisements, and complex interactive design. Some people, however, just want the basic features of smartphones, video calls, watching videos, etc.

Thus I decided to develop an Android Launcher to address these paint points.

2. Key Features

  1. Big colour block for each action
  2. One-tap phone call with an avatar
  3. One-tap video call with an avatar
  4. Always open the app’s home when opening an app
  5. Automatically turn on hand-free mode when having a phone call or video call
  6. Automatically lighten the screen when having a video call
  7. Automatically check and turn on Wifi, avoid having turned off unintentional
  8. The capability of adjusting text size

3. Tech design

3.1 Framework

Use Flutter to develop the launcher, through the native Android language, JAVA or Kotlin would be better for an Android app, I’m more familiar with Flutter.

3.2 Core APIs/Capability

Take advantage of the Accessibility Service of Android, which allows apps to execute some automatic tasks.

4. Screenshots

5. Supported Devices

  1. Xiaomi 12C

6. Source Code

https://github.com/roger-twan/plain_launcher