launcherpro app icon While rooting your Android phone and flashing cool custom ROMs are ways of enhancing your Android phone experience, these two processes are however not easy to carry out. For the uninitiated, these two tasks can become too daunting and frustrating.

So, if you can’t root your Android phone and use custom ROMs, are you left with the stock features of your phone forever? Thankfully, you’re not. There are third-party apps which will allow you to change the look, appearance, settings, and behavior of your Android phone, without the need for rooting. One of the available options is, of course, is using third-party Launcher apps.

Using third-party launcher apps allow you to modify the behavior, look, and appearance of your phone’s home screen and app drawer. One of these launcher apps which I’ve used and currently using is LauncherPro.

Features of LauncherPro Android App

LauncherPro allows you to do the following:

  • specify the number of home screen pages,
  • specify the number of apps to be displayed on the home screen dock,
  • choose what apps to place on the said dock,
  • add LauncherPro widgets home screen pages
  • set animation scheme when shifting from one app to another

Installing the LauncherPro App

LauncherPro is available from the Android Market as a free download. This gives you the basic features of the app which are enough to customize your phone’s home screen and app drawer screens. However, there is a premium pack which will cost you $2.99. Once this unlocker pack is installed, you’ll be able to use advanced features that the free version doesn’t have including the use of LauncherPro widgets.

screenshots of launcherpro preferences - combined

Once you got the app installed, just long press on the home screen button to bring out the launcher selection window. From there, simply choose LauncherPro and tick on the “make this as default” option so that you will not have to do the same process every time you exit from the application screen back to the home screen.

Then, you can start customizing your phone using LauncherPro.

Maximizing the Use of LauncherPro

The first thing that you will want to do once you have LauncherPro installed on your phone is to tap on the Menu button from the home screen. This will bring up various options but this time, your main concern is to tap on “Preferences.”  Right after tapping, you’ll be given a different Settings screen that will let you fully customize your Android phone.

General Settings

Under this setting, you can hide apps that you don’t use from the app drawer, enable scrollable widgets as well as two other options – Keep in memory and Motorola Droid Hack, which you should not use for now as it may cause your phone to become unstable.

screenshots of launcherpro general settings - combined

Home Screen Settings

This is the meat of the LauncherPro customization options for your phone. From here you can specify the number of home screen pages – up to seven, as well specify the number of default screen available. You can also enable trackball scrolling if your phone happens to have a trackball. The other two options under the home screen settings let you choose the looping behavior between loop and bounce or none and choose the transition effect when switching between home screens. There are six options that you can use – scale, rotate, rotate 2, flip, flip 2, and cube. The cube is the coolest of these looping animation.

screenshots of launcherpro homescreen settings

Another nice feature of LauncherPro is the ability to add more columns to the usual 4 x 4  grid format of the Android OS for displaying app icons. With LauncherPro you can specify as much as 10 columns and rows. In addition, you can also set to resize widgets and icons to fit the grid size.

Dock Settings

From here, you can specify the number of docks that you can scroll through. For those who are unaware, this dock is located at the bottom of your home screen usually containing 4 app icons of the most used apps for you. You can make this dock to loop endlessly when scrolling through.

Screenshot of launcherpro dock settings

The other part of the dock settings has something to do with notifications. You can opt to show missed call counts, unread SMS counts and unread Gmail counts, or hide them.

Behaviour Settings

This setting has three options which you can choose to change screen orientation when your phone is rotated (you can turn this on/off by pulling the status bar also) and set the launcher to bring you to your default screen after pressing the home key when you’re not on your default screen.

screenshot of launcherpro behavior settings

Appearance Settings

This is another important setting which you should explore more. The good thing here is that it’s just a matter of ticking or not ticking the several options available. So the options include – show screen indicator, hide notification bar, the home button on app drawer, hide icon labels, show icon labels background, and disable wallpaper scrolling or keep it centered.

screenshots of launcherpro appearance settings - winsnap edited

The other options available let you set the background for the Dock (custom, glass, Froyo, Froyo wide), highlights style (classic, glow, outline) and colors for highlights when tapping on an app icon.

Advanced Settings

Here is where you can tweak various settings which will fully maximize the use of LauncherPro and will also make you appreciate this app more. The first option available for you is the Memory Usage Settings which will help you save more memory when using your phone. Here you can opt to build caches as needed, use home screen caches, clear caches on exit and more.

screenshots of launcherpro advanced settings edited

Under the home screens option, you can choose to have 5 icons rows in home screen (good if you’re using an Android tablet), enables elastic scrolling through home screen, high-quality scrolling for app icon graphics, and minimum scrolling speed.

You can also choose to use the 3D animation for the app drawer, set the number of icons per row in portrait and landscape mode, and open speed of the app drawer when closing or opening it. Additionally, you can also adjust the opening speed of screen previews and when you’re phone is in debugging mode, you can opt to display memory usage.

LP Widget Settings

This is the part where you can set up the necessary accounts included in LauncherPro’s widget feature. This includes selecting skins for the widgets from the available within the app (or you can download skins from the Android Market), authorizing your social networking and email accounts.

screenshots of lp widget settings - combined

Other Features of LauncherPro and Things You Need to Know

LauncherPro also allows you to backup, restore and reset your home screen settings at the tap of the button. You can find these options below the different settings options from the Preferences Menu. These features add more flexibility and give you more options in switching from one Android phone launcher to another. The backup and restore feature ensures that you’ll never lose your customized settings whenever you try out other launcher Android apps.

screenshots of twitter widget and app drawer - combined

Verdict

Our premise at the beginning of this article is that launcher apps such as LauncherPro are good ways of fully customizing the overall look, feel and behavior of your Android phones. After using LauncherPro for several weeks now, I have found this to be true. LauncherPro is a well-developed and conceptualized launcher app for Android; one of the best options available for your Android phone. The best thing about this app, of course, is the fact that you don’t have to root your Android phone.

Download LauncherPro from Android Market

Start a barcode (QR code) scanner on your phone and scan the QR code below. This will take you directly to the Android Market to download the app. If you do not have a QR Code scanner app, choose one from the Top Scanner Apps for Android.

launcherpro qr code

Download Launcher Pro from Android Market.

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