Nova lets you increase or reduce that number as well. The default number of apps you can have on the home screen is 5×5. The best part about the Nova Launcher is the seamless tweaking of the home screen. When you press and hold the widget, you get to resize it, remove it, and check its info. Tap the Widgets option and drag any widget to the home screen. You can actually improve the home screen by using this neat launcher.īesides apps, you can add a lot of useful widgets like the clock, weather, etc. That’s it! You see, it’s ridiculously easy, but there’s a lot more to Nova Launcher than adding apps to the home screen. Drag the apps you want on the home screen just like you did before (you can either drag them from an existing folder or use the App Drawer (your phone’s App menu).Open the home screen on your phone (press home button).
Make sure to install and update the Nova Launcher to the latest version (link provided above).If you found this post worth reading and want to kick in a buck or two to the author, click here. There are still a few little differences in the way the Fire does things-the settings menus and link-sharing dialogue are still FireOS’s, among other things-but if you’ve been frustrated that you couldn’t get the launcher to act like you wanted it to, this should allow you to change that.
For more information, see LauncherHijack’s homepage on the XDA Android hacking forums.Ĭhanging the launcher brings the Fire up to about 90% as useful as a “real” Android tablet. Uncheck the box to hide system files and the Fire’s default launcher, “Home,” should appear in the list.Īnd that should be that. If you want to change launchers back, run LauncherHijack and tap the triple-dot “options” icon at the top right.On some tablets, I’ve had to restart a couple of times before it started working. If the launcher doesn’t appear on the list, you may need to restart the tablet and try again. Run LauncherHijack, and tap on the launcher you want to use.Go into your Fire’s Settings -> Accessibility menu, scroll down to the very bottom, and make sure that “To detect home button press” is set to “on.” (This option won’t appear until you’ve installed LauncherHijack, so do that first.) It may warn you that this type of option can allow someone to steal anything you type in, such as credit card numbers-that’s a standard warning for any plug-in that can intercept device input, such as a custom keyboard, so don’t pay it too much mind.Just use your Fire to browse to that link and tap on the file that ends with “APK.” Install the latest version of LauncherHijack.(Or, in the case of Google Now, that it will tell you to change your launcher setting.) Install the launcher you want to use, and make sure it will run on your Fire at all.Remember, you may also have to register your Fire with Google to get it to let you log into the store. It should go without saying, but if you’re going to want to add a new launcher from the Play Store, you first have to install the Play Store on your Fire.It helpfully told me I needed to change the launcher setting in my settings menu, but that’s a setting that the Fire’s settings menu doesn’t have.įortunately, as with many Fire annoyances, clever Android hackers out there have come up with a way around it, and you don’t even need to root your tablet to make it work. Some launchers will let you run them manually-but my favorite launcher, the Google Now launcher, won’t. The problem is, Amazon doesn’t provide any easy way to change launchers. I also missed having access to launcher widgets, and the ease of swiping left to get to the Google Assistant. There weren’t any huge annoyances, which is why it took so long to get fed up, but finally I got tired of the lack of an app drawer where I could access an app right away if I couldn’t remember what folder I’d put it in. I’ve enjoyed using my Fire HD 8 tablet as my “main” Android tablet these last few months, but I finally got fed up with some of the annoyances of the built-in Fire launcher.
There’s a link to a renamed and rebuilt APK file in the thread, and I’ve tried it and it does work-though the usual cautions about installing packages from unverified sources apply. As the posters to this XDA Developers forum thread determined, Amazon has apparently blocked any package by that specific name from running, and working around it is as simple as rebuilding the package with a new name.
Update, : LauncherHijack, mentioned in the post below, has abruptly stopped working.