I replaced my Google Pixel home screen with a custom launcher and I’m never going back

My Google Pixel 10 Pro is an excellent phone with a ton of exclusive features, many of which I use every day. Pretty darn good cameras, slick performance, and a stunning design. But there’s something that sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m talking about the Pixel Launcher.

Don’t get me wrong—I like the way it looks and performs, but it’s simply too limiting for my taste. On the other hand, a custom launcher I started using a few weeks ago offers a slew of options that should satisfy most, if not all, Pixel owners. In fact, it’s so good that I don’t think I will return to the built-in launcher ever again.

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Looking to upgrade to a Pixel but not sure if you need all the bells and whistles of the more expensive models? You won’t be disappointed with the standard Pixel 10 model. Coming in striking colors, Gemini features, and seven years of updates, you can’t go wrong with this purchase.

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The Pixel Launcher is quite restrictive

The weakest link of the entire Pixel experience

I’ve already written about this, but I find the Pixel Launcher too constraining for comfort. It comes with a dearth of customization options, which means I can’t fine-tune my phone’s Home screen exactly to my liking. For instance, the launcher doesn’t support icon packs, you’re stuck with a 5×6 Home screen grid, you can’t change icon size independently of other UI elements, there’s no way to remove the Google Search bar at the bottom, and you can’t change the default Home screen page. The only update Android 17 has brought is the ability to remove under-icon app labels. Bummer.

This didn’t matter much during the honeymoon phase, but once I’d spent more than a few months with my Pixel, these shortcomings began to annoy me more with each passing week. The worst thing is that I love how the Pixel Launcher looks and performs. Even though I switch to the Windows Phone-style METROV Launcher every few weeks, I always end up going back to the Pixel Launcher because of its design and smooth-as-butter performance. But a few weeks ago, I discovered a third-party launcher that offers everything I like about the Pixel Launcher, along with a host of customization options.

The Lawnchair launcher looks like the Pixel Launcher, but brings so much more to the table

Looks can be deceiving

Enter Lawnchair, an open-source third-party launcher based on the Pixel Launcher that the developers describe as “a supercharged version of the Pixel Launcher you know and love.” And let me tell you, they’ve got a point.

On the surface, Lawnchair looks and feels like the regular Pixel Launcher. You’ve got the same buttery performance and familiar design, the same Home screen layout, including the At a Glance widget at the top and the Google Search bar at the bottom, the same icons, along with the ability to change their shape to one of the designs found in the Pixel Launcher, and the same 5×6 grid. But once you scratch the surface, you discover that you can customize all of it to your liking, and then some.

For instance, you can remove both the At a Glance widget and the Google Search bar, freeing up more space for your own widgets and app icons. While you can remove At a Glance on the Pixel Launcher as well, the Search bar is unyielding, and I doubt Google will ever let us remove it. Better still, you can remove the Search bar from both the Home screen and the app drawer if you so choose.

You can also increase the number of columns and rows on the Home screen grid, which I immediately did by switching to a 5×7 layout that works much better with the Pixel 10 Pro’s 6.3-inch display. Add the ability to remove the Search bar, and my Home screen not only fits more elements but also looks less cluttered than before.

I kept the default number of dock icons, but you can increase it to as many as 10 if you want. You can also adjust the padding, enable a dock background, and freely tweak its color, opacity, and margins. This is just a small slice of the deluge of customization options Lawnchair offers.

You can also customize folders and the app drawer (including adding folders to it), adjust icon size, use icon packs (Lawnchair has a companion icon pack called Lawnicons that I recommend trying), remove the status bar and switch it to dark mode when using light wallpapers, customize how widgets look, and, one of my favorite features, enable notification counters instead of plain notification dots. It’s just so refreshing to once again be able to see exactly how many new emails or chat messages I’ve received.

Credit: Goran Damnjanovic / How-To Geek

There are still some Pixel Launcher limitations Lawnchair hasn’t addressed. For instance, you still can’t change the default Home screen page, although the feature should arrive with the next stable release. You also don’t get One UI Home’s (the default launcher on Samsung phones) best feature, widget stacking, which I doubt will find its way to Lawnchair unless Google makes it a built-in Android feature.

At least you can enable infinite scrolling and access your rightmost Home screen page with a single right swipe. It sure beats using the same gesture to open Google Feed.

Lawnchair isn’t the only custom launcher I’m using on my Pixel

I’ve got another one

Credit: Goran Damnjanovic / How-To Geek

Aside from Lawnchair, I’m also using the Windows Phone-style METROV Launcher, which I also really like. However, unlike Lawnchair, METROV still has some way to go before I can bestow on it the title of my primary phone launcher.

The overall experience is very solid and the best of all the Windows Phone launchers on Android, but METROV can greet you with a black screen after you exit an app, it suffers from microstutters while you scroll up and down the Home screen, and it includes a few other bugs and glitches that need to be ironed out. Even so, I still switch back to it every now and then, but I prefer the Pixel Launcher experience with the added benefit of Lawnchair’s wide range of customization options.

If you feel limited by your Pixel’s default launcher I can’t recommend Lawnchair enough

If the built-in Pixel Launcher feels too restrictive to you as well, I’d recommend giving Lawnchair a try. It’s free, it’s open source, it works great, and it doesn’t have any major bugs—or at least I haven’t found any during the time I’ve been using it. I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Coupled with Essentials, an app that includes a rich collection of customization tools every Android power user will appreciate, your Pixel can go from one of the most rigid Android phones to a device where you can tweak (almost) everything to your heart’s content.