Smile App Launcher

A good deal of care went into making this app and it’s clear. It’s awesome that this is available for free, and for apps that have an up to date (or easy to find) URL it works great. Unfortunately, I cannot get shortcuts made with automations to work at all. Whenever the Shortcuts app opens to create an automation, I follow all the steps properly. However, if I ever leave the Smile app, which is required to create the automation, Smile essentially reloads/crashes and I can’t complete the shortcut creation. This is one of the only apps on my phone that I cannot multitask with without it resetting. It likely doesn’t help (and probably ultimately comes down to) my iPhone being older at this point (13 mini). But you’d think this app should be somewhat lightweight compared to Safari with multiple tabs, or Reddit. I cannot switch between them without the apps reloading most of the time. This app does that every time, and reduces the utility of using this launcher significantly.

There’s a lot of potential here to be the optimal free alternative to other apps that do what this one does. There’s plenty of customization options (other than image wallpapers but that’s neither here nor there cause minimalist design), easy to set up, and after tweaking the settings a little, it ain’t that bad. However, the thing that caught me up is the way it functions when you select apps. Maybe it’s because I didn’t reduce motion, but the transitions between Home Screen and apps is super janky. Maybe I pay too much attention to things that don’t matter that much, but it’s just really distracting. Especially when I use a shortcut, and it opens the shortcut app, and then the app I wanted to open. I’m sure this is an issue with the device and not the app, but it feels like the app can at least mitigate this issue. It’d also be nice if there were more preset apps for the utilities like the camera or calculator.

Really enjoying this interface so far. I found it through the digital minimalism/detox subreddit (I can’t remember which specifically) and I’m glad I did. Having no paywall is so wonderful, and I found syncing it with my shortcuts to be pretty easy. If I had to make a critique, I wish that eventually there would be more than just 5 widgets, simply for personalization’s sake, but sometimes having a limitation is a good thing, so it hasn’t posed an issue yet. If there’s a way to buy a Kofi or contribute one-off to help keep it free I’d be happy to do that. Thanks for making this app!