Be Evie.

Today I want to talk to you about a new Android launcher I discovered yesterday among the Play Store suggestions. Its name is Evie Launcher.

Yes, before you start moaning, I know, it’s plenty of launchers out there and many of them are crap. I also know that you will not abandon Nova Launcher so easily, but, you know, why don’t you try it after reading my review?

It’s small. As you can see from the screenshot I made, it only takes, globally, 7.4 MB of storage, less than Nova, if I remember correctly.

It’s nice and clean. As soon as I started it for the first time it asked me if I’d like to keep my previous launcher’s (Google Now launcher) settings and here they were. So, here’s what it looks like on my Moto G 2014.

It has some nice features. For example, you can choose the app drawer to be a list, as I prefer, or a grid of icons, just tapping in the top right corner icon when opening the drawer. Also, it has built-in and default set swipe up to open the drawer.

Evie Launcher offers a fair number of customization options: they are not as many as you can find in Nova, for example, you can’t change the font for the icon labels, you can’t set a background for the app drawer and you can’t change the layout of the folders in the home screen when talking about preview and background.
Anyway, you can choose whether you have a dock or not, you can set your favorite grid dimensions, number of icons in the dock, the icon size. It has a backup and restore option and you can save your backups on Google Drive. When opening a folder you have a full screen view of the folder content. There’s even a slider to activate the two fingers swipe up gesture to open Google Now.

As you can have guessed by looking at the screenshots, the unread notification counter is built-in, so, differently from Nova, you don’t have to install another yet small app nor have the prime version. But the feature that stroke me most was the search. Yes, the search widget.

Here’s what it looks like. Yes, it resembles a lot the iOS search feature in terms of look and feel but isn’t it nice? It’s much faster than Google search, at least in my device and, if you have the location service turned on, it also looks for places around you. I don’t know the exact way it works, I’m no programmer, but I like it.

For example, if you type something in the search bar, it search for it among your apps, among apps in the Play Store and among places around you. The results divided by the white line and starting with the Google icon are the result of the search on the web; if you tap on any of these ones, you’ll be redirected to the Google app. Nice, isn’t it?

Well, it’s not Nova nor Pixel nor Action Launcher, but IMHO it deserves a try, for sure. Have I ever mentioned that Evie Launcher has no prime version and no advertising in it?