Wednesday, January 13

Android launcher update adds auto-rotate, forces icon size consistency

Icons now get forced to a standard size.

An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android's home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.

Google's icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android's app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer's wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.

Google doesn't police its app store the way Apple does, and since asking nicely via the guidelines doesn't work, Google has turned to automatically reducing the size of icons via software. This idea was actually pioneered last year in the third-party app "Nova Launcher," which similarly made fat icons smaller with a software enforcer.

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