Looking for another smart launcher that ties into the apps and habits of your life? THING Launcher wants to be your next launcher. This launcher aims to automate your phone and your home as it listens to your life and watches you move from place to place and task to task. Like all launchers, it is a very rough start, but there is definitely potential.
By tying into apps like Spotify and Hue, along with your phone's sensors and services like Bluetooth and GPS, THING allows you to create what it calls Agents, recipes not unlike Tasker or IFTTT, that will control your phone, your lights, and your Bluetooth devices either automatically or when you manually trigger them. It's a nice idea, but the list of available services to tie into those Agents is small right now, and the UI for building these Agents is still a little rough.
Rougher still is the way the home screen is laid out. You have a dock with five spots, one of which is the app drawer/Agents shortcut, then a revolving band of apps above it that ill re-arrange itself based off your habits and location. As with any smart sort, it takes some time to get to know you, and until it does, get ready for a lot of page flipping. You can use icon packs, but no individual icons, and the home screen grid is the standard (and ever so space-wasting) 4x4.
It'll be interesting to see how this launcher develops, and as a free launcher, there are far worse ways to try an organize your digital life.
