A big, calm home screen for Android. Phone, messages and contacts in the same app.

Table of Contents

• Why HomeTiles?
• Screenshots
• Features
• Install
• Build
• Reproducible builds
• Permissions
• Looks
• Testing
• Contributing
• License and credits

Why HomeTiles?

Large-tile launchers exist, but the well known one now spreads phone, messages and the launcher itself over three paid apps. HomeTiles puts them back in one place, gives the source away, and asks for no account.

• 3 in one. Home screen, dialler, messages and contacts ship together and look the same.
• Made for a small screen. Developed on a Unihertz Jelly 2: 3 inches, 480 x 854 px at 220 dpi, which leaves 349 x 597 dp once the system bars are off. Big tiles are hardest there, and that is the point.
• No network. There is no INTERNET permission in the manifest, so nothing can leave the phone even by accident.
• No account, no ads, no telemetry. Your configuration is a file on your phone.
• Readable by default. Atkinson Hyperlegible as the standard typeface, tiles that shrink their own text before they cut it, and every colour pair at 4.5:1 or better.
• It does not dial by itself. Not even the SOS tile: it writes, then offers a button that opens the keypad with the number in it.

Screenshots

Features

Home screen

• A grid of large tiles, each one freely assigned: an app, a contact, a shortcut, a widget, a built-in function or a jump to another screen.
• Grid size, tile size, colours, labels and label position are all settings.
• Header with clock, date, battery level and charge bar. It can be switched off.
• Long press reads the tile out or shows its name full screen, for eyes that need it.
• Paging buttons instead of swiping, for hands that do not swipe well.

Phone

• Keypad with big keys, speed dial on 2 to 9, call log with grouping.
• Its own call screen: answer, reject, mute, speaker, hold, keypad, bluetooth.
• Turn a call down with a short written answer.
• At the ear the proximity sensor turns the screen off during a call. On speaker or with a headset it stays on.
• HomeTiles can take the phone role, but it works without it.
• Emergency numbers always go to the system dialler.

Messages

• Thread list, conversation, writing and sending, delivery receipts.
• All four components Android demands of a default SMS app.
• Picture messages already on the phone are shown, text and image.
• Filter by number and by word.

Contacts

• Search that ignores accents and case, sorting by first or last name, favourites.

App list

• One long list with search and "recently used", and apps can be hidden.
• It opens with the list from last time and checks for new or removed apps in the background.
• The last row is always HomeTiles settings, so there is a way in even when no tile leads there. The search finds that row too.

SOS

• A countdown, then a message to up to five people, with the location if there is one.
• After sending, a button opens the keypad with the first number. HomeTiles never dials by itself.

Safety net

• If the launcher crashes twice in a row while starting, a plain screen appears instead of a black phone: the system phone and contacts apps at the top, then try again, settings, choose another home screen and reset the tiles. A start that an update or the system cut short does not count.

Backup

• The whole configuration exports to a file and reads back on the next phone.

Phones with keys

• A setting for flip phones and other phones with a keypad: lists start with the focus on the first entry and leave out titles and photos. By default it follows whether the phone has keys.

Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian.

Install

HomeTiles is on F-Droid. The app runs on Android 8 (API 26) and above; it is developed against Android 11 on the target device.

F-Droid builds and signs the app itself, so there is no APK on the GitHub releases. The store texts and screenshots it shows come from fastlane/metadata/. To build it yourself, see below.

Build

source ./env.sh          # sets ANDROID_HOME, JAVA_HOME and the gradle path
./gradlew assembleDebug
./gradlew test
./gradlew installDebug

You need the Android SDK (compileSdk 35) and a JDK 21. The path to the JDK deliberately does not live in gradle.properties; it comes from JAVA_HOME.

Modules: :app and four libraries, :core:model (no Android imports at all), :core:data, :core:system and :core:ui.

Reproducible builds

assembleRelease produces an unsigned APK. Signing it with the debug key would be a lie about where it came from. Whoever publishes brings their own key; F-Droid signs its own builds anyway.

Two full rebuilds without the build cache give the same file:

./gradlew --no-build-cache clean assembleRelease
sha256sum app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release-unsigned.apk

Checked on 28 October 2026 with AGP 8.7.3, Gradle 8.11.1 and JDK 21, built twice without the build cache, both times

eb02a34180978779ec8e1681a66abd9bb1d41ac71b548f88fabc47664252346e   1 972 443 bytes

for Commit 500c61b. A checksum belongs to one state of the source, not to the project: whoever wants to recompute it builds that commit. tools/rebuild.sh does both runs and the comparison in one call.

Permissions

All of them are optional and are asked for only when the matching feature is used. Without a SIM or without a granted role the launcher keeps working.

Permission	What for
CALL_PHONE	calling from speed dial, contacts and SOS
READ_CALL_LOG, WRITE_CALL_LOG	showing and deleting the call log
READ_CONTACTS, WRITE_CONTACTS	contacts and the favourite mark
SEND_SMS, READ_SMS, RECEIVE_SMS	messages
READ_PHONE_STATE	the signal bars
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION	the location in an emergency message
POST_NOTIFICATIONS	showing a new message and an incoming call
USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT	an incoming call on a sleeping screen
VIBRATE	feedback on a press
WAKE_LOCK	the screen off at the ear during a call

No INTERNET, and no QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES: a launcher gets by with <queries> and LauncherApps.

Anyone reading the archive will still find okhttp3/.../publicsuffixes.gz: the image library Coil brings an HTTP client that HomeTiles never calls, since contact photos come through content://. R8 removes the code, the 41 kB of data stay. Without the INTERNET permission none of it can reach the network.

Looks

Dark is the main theme, with a light one, a contrast theme (yellow on black), a paper theme for e-ink screens (black on white) and the setting "follow the phone". Every tile is one flat colour, the icon at the top left, the label at the bottom left inside a zone of fixed height, so the baselines line up even when a label wraps. All colour pairs meet at least 4.5:1, and a rule checks that for every combination the app is able to draw.

More in PLAN.md, section 3. That file is in German: the plan is written in the language it was thought in. The running log it refers to stays on the machine it was written on - it records measurements taken on a real phone, screen contents included, and that is nobody's business but its owner's.

Testing

There is no test framework here beyond JUnit, and there are 1546 rules in 313 classes. Most of them do not run the app; they read its source and hold it to a promise:

• A permission in the manifest that no code uses is a claim about abilities that do not exist, and a rule lists every place that may dial or send.
• Colour pairs are computed, not eyeballed.
• A number in a user-visible sentence must come from the constant it talks about.
• Facts measured on a device carry the date they were measured on.
• Text must fit the smallest screen the app targets, measured rather than assumed.

The rules exist because the app is meant for someone who cannot easily work around a bug.

./gradlew test

Contributing

Focused pull requests are welcome.

• Kotlin, Compose, and no new dependency without a reason.
• New behaviour comes with a rule that fails without it.
• Comments say what the code cannot: a condition you cannot see, a why-not, or where a number came from.

License and credits

HomeTiles is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

HomeTiles is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

• License: GPL-3.0-or-later
• Typeface: Atkinson Hyperlegible by the Braille Institute of America under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, see LICENSE-Atkinson-Hyperlegible.txt. It is the default because it pulls apart letters that otherwise look alike.

Libraries

• Jetpack Compose - the whole interface
• Coil - contact photos and picture messages
• kotlinx.serialization - the configuration file
• AndroidX Core, Activity and Lifecycle - the platform glue