5.1

Released on August 2018

Light Ambient Mode

The ambient theme was designed not only to make the UI more graceful but also to ensure the readability of the information on the screen (widgets/icon labels). In Smart Launcher 5.0 this goal was achieved by using a dark overlay on top of light wallpapers but this caused light wallpapers to look darker and dull. Light Ambient theme works by keeping unaltered the wallpaper lightness while making the foreground UI items black.

Search Page

The Search page is now a module like the App page or the Widget page. This means they have the same working and they will, eventually, be swappable in the near future.

Notifications

The notification system has been rebuilt. The system in 5.0 was designed to work only using the official Android APIs. Sadly, app developments rarely use the API (event Gmail doesn’t!) so we stopped trusting in other developers’ goodwill and we created a system that uses different approaches to get notification count. Hopefully, this will allow us to avoid showing a blank dot when the option “show event count” is marked.

Rename folders

You can now rename a folder by clicking its name while it’s open.

Showcase your home screen

The functionality “Take a screenshot” is now Showcase your home screen. The tool has been improved to create more complex artwork, adding shadows and simulating a device frame. It allows to preview the generated artwork and to save it locally or share it as before. If the tool will be appreciated we will expand it in future.

5 new adaptive icon shapes

The new shapes add new effects like brushes and pixels. Feature pack is required to unlock adaptive icon shapes.

Fixes

• In SL 5.0 enabling a single gesture caused all the pages to be scrollable only by swiping from the borders. In SL 5.1, double finger gestures don’t interfere with page navigations anymore and single finger gestures affect only a specific direction.

• Improved drag&drop interactions. For example, now you can move an item from a folder to another one with a single drag&drop action.

• Android P users can now turn off their screen without any side effect (like fingerprint not working)

• Home page icons have been updated with more vibrant colors.

• Some UI elements have been updated with rounded corners.

• The wallpaper scroll is now interpolated to appear more natural.

• The search bar can now use Ambient theme even when set as floating(Search bar → appearance →Skin → Ambient)

• Dark system icons are automatically enabled on very light backgrounds (Only Android Marshmallow and higher)

• Many other improvements and bugs fixed.