This Android launcher reminds me of Windows Phone in the best possible way

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t an Android phone fan at first. I wasn’t an iPhone enthusiast, either. Instead, I was a full-fledged Windows Phone disciple. I absolutely loved the Metro UI, featuring a fresh, tile-based interface that popped on an OLED screen. I loved the interface and cameras so much that I bought a Lumia 1020 and a Lumia 950. 

I’ve known about Android launchers that emulate this Windows Phone look for years now, and briefly dabbled with them back in the day. But my Windows Phone itch is stronger than ever, and I found two launchers that came closest to scratching it. After looking at both Square Home and Launcher 10 on my Pixel phone (sacrilege, I know), I ultimately settled on the former.

Both launchers do a great job of emulating the Windows Phone experience from a visual perspective. I’d give the edge to Launcher 10 for its app drawer design in particular, but I chose Square Home for several reasons.

Perhaps the biggest reason is that Live Tiles are available for free here, whereas Launcher 10 requires payment to unlock them. For the uninitiated, Live Tiles were Microsoft’s answer to widgets on Android, offering square or rectangular tiles that constantly displayed updates and other info. For example, you could see missed calls in the phone tile, notifications in the Facebook tile, and your favorite photos in the photos tile.

Square Home primarily populates the Live Tiles with information pulled from your notifications, and this obviously requires your permission. It’s nevertheless a smart way to bring these tiles to life, and you’ll get info like Gmail snippets, calendar entries, and more. I also quite like the media widget live tile that pops up, which is derived from the media widget in the notification shade. And yes, you can actually interact with the media controls. In another neat touch, the old platform’s flipping tiles are here, too, showing you different nuggets of info. You can also make these tiles transparent to show your wallpaper, much like later versions of Microsoft’s platform. So I never really felt like I was missing out in a big way.

The launcher also won me over with its tile adjustments. Microsoft allowed Windows Phone users to adjust the size of these tiles, going from the regular size to one-quarter size to double-wide. Square Home lets you intuitively adjust a tile’s size by long-pressing the tile, much like Windows Phone itself (and with a few extra size options too). Launcher 10 offers granular size adjustments with sliders by default, but it’s not nearly as intuitive and familiar if you’re a Windows Phone fan like me. Thankfully, you can dig a little deeper in Square Home if you want more detailed adjustments too.

I also appreciate Square Home’s very reasonable payment options. You can choose to pay $1 a year or make a one-time payment of $6. I know many companies ditched one-time purchases because of greed financial reasons, but I’m glad to see this option here. In saying so, the team doesn’t adequately convey the benefits of paying for premium on its website or Play Store listing. However, it seems like settings with green icons are paid additions. These include advanced animations, media controller functionality, lots of gestures, and your choice of font.

Another point in Square Home’s favor is its ad-free nature. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with offering an ad-supported app, and Launcher 10 is very restrained in its approach (seemingly restricted to the settings menu, while letting you pay to get rid of them), but it’s nice to have an ad-free experience out of the box. 

Square Home’s list of features doesn’t stop here. It offers a customizable app drawer, wallpaper-based color theming, support for tablets and foldable phones, and Private Space support. The team recently updated the app to fix issues with widgets in One UI 7 too, so the developers are still actively fixing things after all this time.

I can think of a few small areas of improvement for Square Home, though, such as improved handling of third-party widgets and more preset tile colors. But these are relatively insignificant wishlist items, and we definitely have a full-featured experience.

Even though the Windows Phone ship sailed a long time ago, I’m glad to see that the community has picked up the baton and sprinted with it. I’m definitely partial to Square Home, but both of these launchers are great ways to effectively emulate that experience. Now, about Microsoft building its own Windows Phone launcher for Android.