inkOS: Text Based Launcher with Notifications for Mudita Kompakt

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I would like to present inkOS
A simple text based launcher with basic notification capabilities.

preview
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This is my first time making an app, so It’s a fork of mLauncher which is a fork of oLauncher. Of course it’s free and open source, you can download it from Github

You can read some “documentation” since I tried to keep the feature descriptions short in the app settings.

ATTENTION!
To install third party launcher in Mudita Komapkt you need to enable inkOS or another launcher as a default launcher. Then DISABLE the Mudita Launcher through ADB or Universal Android De-bloater. Don’t uninstall it, just disable it. (search the forum for guides to do so).

I’ve made a Youtube video to show the app features so you can see it’s for you. I wasn’t able to narrate the video due to time and lack of a good microphone. But I hope it help you seeing the features:

What I’ve done here is remove all the settings I considered unnecessary, and for the most part I made the scrolling to work with up and down swipes instead of smooth scrolling.

It has almost to no animations, so it’s quite optimized for E-ink devices much more than the other Launchers, and I would say it’s also easier in the eyes.

The point of this launcher is to only use the home featured apps, the full app drawer lives in the Settings. There’s also a hidden apps section (for apps that you want to hide from the App Drawer like system apps that you don’t ever want to see).

For home you can choose the number of total apps you want in home, and number of pages. And the app will divide them and distribute them into those pages. I’ve added custom fonts uploading from storage, which in addition to custom sizes and padding allow for you to create your own theme. There are no alignment settings to the left and right, center is the only possibility and I won’t be adding those settings on purpose.

What Mudita Kompakt was missing is any notification recording other than phone/sms.

For home screen you can use the Home Notifications:

  • Show just an * near the app name that has notifications
  • Show the actual notification message under it
  • Show the media playback name or just and indicator music note.
  • These can be fully turned off or you can just use one or the other.

To simplify notification filtering, since the phone has some system notifications on the back that might bombard you, I have gone with an allow list. Basically for home notifications you have a separate Allow list, where you can choose which apps in homepage will be allowed to show notifications, for me it’s Signal, Whatsapp, SMS, Phone and Music/Podcasts. Depending on what font size you choose for badge text notifications you can limit the number of characters that appear, so you don’t get overwhelmed. It also has settings that allow you to choose to show Name, group, message (you can enable disable which part you want).

  • Now for people that want more detailed notifications I’ve created a Notification Window, which is my interpretation of Notifications Tray. It’s on purpose designed like this, so you look at the notifications with a purpose.
  • It will only show one notification at a time, and you’ll have to either Dismiss it or open the app to reply/action. It allows you to read the full notification for most scenarios, even pretty long messages. You can swipe up and down same as in the home-area with no animations to bother you.

E-ink refresh:
This is a simple feature for Mudita Kompakt in particular. Since I can’t access the E-ink controls I simply added a black/white screen refresh that will clean the ghosting in the screen. Anytime you come from an app to home, and anytime you close the quick settings tray it will refresh the display if this feature is turned on. It’s absolutely necessary if you’re using the dark mode.

Hope you like it. I have tested the app myself and I’ve using it for almost 2 months now, so it should be ok for daily use. But please report any bugs that you see. I’ll try to fix them when I can even though I’m pretty busy with work right now, that’s why it took so long to publish this even though it was “ready” a month ago.

This app is free, will always be free. If you find it useful you can help by doing the usual.
If you have a github account press “star” button. And if you’re on YouTube consider subscribing, and leaving a like because I’m trying to make some more minimalist launchers and I had started work on a simple Text based calendar.

Thanks for your attention.

If you’re getting “background connection enabled” and similar notifications that are caused by the lack of Google Play Services try the guide from user solv

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so glad to see this! Thank you for your hard work and finishing it out!

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Just tried it. I can say it is excellent. Only one problem for me that is there for many launchers only not in Niagara.

So i use a kill apps app to kill all background processes, in the app I can make a home screen/app drawer shortcut. It only appears in Niagara for now. If you could patch that then it is definitely number one launcher for me.

Few more suggestions.

  1. Add optional date to home screen
  2. Possibility to move the battery to the top together with time and date
  3. Add network status to home screen
    This way all info could be on the home screen and the status bar could be disabled.
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@ ryanness

Thank you for the kind words!

Thank you for the feedback and for trying the app.

Currently I’ve only included the workaround in Settings → Advanced:
Lock home apps + Longpress for app info, This will open the window to kill the app.

I know it’s not all background processes for killing all background processes is counter-productive, because reopening them and reloading them to ram takes more processing power and will lower the battery.

But when I’m more free I’ll take a look at the kill apps app and see how it works and see how can i implement such a feature. Thanks for the suggestion.

The other suggestions:

  1. Date was in the original APP, I removed it on purpose. I would love to have multiple widgets for people to choose like date, alarm, events, media player but I was trying to optimise the app for other small devices like QIN phones and it’s difficult to keep them visible for all screen aspect ratios. That’s why I also removed the alingment, there’s a lot of apps that have that I wanted something simpler.

  2. The reason the battery is there is the app list is centered vertically and other wise it looks empty. My use case is to either use clock and battery or no widgets at all.

  3. My idea is to create another fragment like the notification window to add all the quick tools there to see network, wifi, bluetooth, flashlight so you don’t have to use the phone one.

But that remains for the future, I’m new at this, I installed Android Studio in May :smiley:

Edit: @john765 Do you mean this shortcut button?

shortcut
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This seems simply awesome! I can’t wait to give it a try. Notifications (or lack of) are part of the reasons why I want a Mudita Kompakt. Because they cause distraction. But if sideloaded apps (which I intend to use, like WhatsApp and Messenger) cannot display any sort of badge on their app icon, then I feel like your app would be needed.
Thank you for the work!

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@darenju

Thank you!
Notifications are optional, you disable during onboarding or in notification settings.

Notifications do cause distraction that’s why I have implemented these features:

  • Allowlist for apps on home notifications
  • Allowlist for apps in notification window
    So you don’t get flooded with useless notifications for apps that you open once a day or per week.

Then the notification window has a dismiss and open buttons. You need to make sure what kind of notifications you want there, because there’s no clear notifications button on purpose, you need to either go mute people/groups or remove the app from the allowlist.

In the beginning i started created a notification tray where notifications show like in default android a list of all notifications, which you could swipe and expand. But I scrapped that and made my own interpretation of Notifications (like reading letters).

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just installed this, and it’s perfect. Thank you for making it. I’ll have to figure out how to turn off signal’s background connection notification. Very grateful to have something that works so well.

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@solv Glad you like it!

Did you get Signal from Signal website or Aurora Store? I had it from Signal site and I was getting the annoying background connection all the time. I switched to the AuroraStore apk and it doesn’t show it to me anymore.

Hope this helps

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Technically I’m using ‘molly’ from f-droid. signal from the website shows the background connection too. It’s not too bothersome. I will just have to figure out how to open notification settings for the app again, I did it once.

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Thank you for the insight.

I still do not have my hands on the Kompakt yet, so I will check this out once I finally have it!
Would there be a way to “combine” the Kompakt OS K “homescreen” and your notification board? I think the “reading letters” way is interesting and really matches the aura and goal around Mudita.

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It kills the apps I have selected. For example my setup is only WhatsApp is whitelisted. And it kills for example browser, navi , music etc… it’s a great app, it’s called Killapps , here is the link

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Check the bottom of my comment, the killapps shortcut button is working for me. It’s showing on my app as an overlay.

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No. It can be added as a shortcut to the app drawer or the main screen, and then in the list on Niagara. And on normal android .

To say that your idea at number 3 sounds intriguing

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See here at the bottom , that’s a shortcut. And by pressing it it does the job. This was added via Killapps app. Not via accessibility as you did there. But that could work also. Must test it.

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@john765 Ok I understand what you mean now. I’ll add it to the possible features to support Shortcuts in the applabels.

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Thanks for your effort. And this accessibility shortcut only enables and disables the killapp. It does not kill apps.
I believe this option would be great for other apps too. As for example browser shortcuts and many other apps.

You are doing well giving that you started in may. Keep it going.

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Thanks for the words.

Yeah the kill apps feature is very useful, that’s why I made the trip shorter by allowing to kill them from home. The current Mudita approach is very long and tiring.

I hope I can make something similar buy lightweight. The original app that i forked was 30mb+ and I removed a few features and cleaned up to only 3.85mb.

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@gezimos Thanks so much for putting this together! I do have a question on how it works with voicemail notifications? I sideloaded One Shade for notifications, which does notify when there’s a voicemail, and that has turned out to be a necessity for me.

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@timekeeper I have never used voicemail so I don’t even know how it works properly. Does voicemail use the Phone app?

Please give it a try and let me know if they work

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Bye-bye Niagara, hello inkOS!!!

While Niagara was good enough for my purpose of having notifications , it simply wasn’t optimized for this device. inkOS has raised the bar ten-fold and not sure anything can really top this.

inkOS is a premium product. Hands down.

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