D2 Launcher — a minimal sci-fi HUD launcher for Android
D2 Launcher turns an Android home screen into a clean sci-fi HUD: one colour, one style and no clutter. The screen shows the clock, today's reminders and the apps you actually use. D2 Launcher is the studio's own app, from the first idea to its release on Google Play in October 2026.
A launcher is the app you look at a hundred times a day, so I used it on my own phone from the very first build and fixed whatever got in the way. That is where the automatic categories, the one-colour icons and the themes that look like screens from science fiction came from.
- Apps sort themselves: automatic categories (Communication, Social, Media, Photo, Games, Work, Finance, Tools and more), an app drawer with category tabs and a search that finds an app after two letters and also searches contacts and the web
- One colour on every icon: our own icon pack in which hundreds of popular apps have an icon drawn in the same style, while all others take the theme colour
- 4 themes: HUD with animated byte rain, Paper with a typewriter font, Blueprint as a blue cyanotype and Amber CRT as an old monitor, each with its own wallpapers
- Any accent colour: in the HUD theme the colour can stay fixed or change every day or every hour
- Focus and screen time: in the evening social apps disappear from the home screen, and the screen shows how much time you have spent on your phone today
- Gestures, widgets and news: swipes and a double tap to turn the screen off, a widget page, news from chosen sources, folders, hidden apps and a settings backup
- 13 languages: Croatian, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Indonesian and Vietnamese
- Free and ad-free: Pro adds the Paper, Blueprint and Amber CRT themes, wallpapers, focus mode, screen time and custom gestures. The first 7 days of Pro are free, after that it is €2.99 a year or €7.99 one-time
I ran the whole cycle: designing the HUD interface and the four themes, drawing the one-colour icon pack, development, translations into 13 languages, the icon, screenshots and Google Play texts, and the release.
Technologies: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, animated backgrounds (byte rain, plotter) drawn on Canvas, AppWidgetHost for widgets, Google Play Billing for Pro and an icon pack that can be updated from our server.
