HomeTiles released

I originally built HomeTiles for myself. The best known large-tile launcher for Android is sold as three separate purchases (home screen, phone and messages) which cost 24.97 euros together on 12 October 2026. Freely assigning every button on the home screen is one of the things you only get after paying. HomeTiles is the same idea with nothing locked and with a grid that really works on 3 inches.

A tile can open an app, call a contact or jump to another page. The phone, messages and contacts are built into the same app and look the same. On a screen of 480 by 854 pixels every label has to fit, which is why a tile makes its text smaller before it cuts a word. The app has no internet permission and no account and it never dials on its own: even the SOS tile only sends a message to up to five people and then opens the keypad with the number filled in. Everything also works with arrow keys, a select key and number keys, so it runs on Android phones with real keys as well. It comes in English, German, Spanish, French and Italian, with a dark, a light and a high contrast theme.

Most of the roughly 1,500 tests never start the app. They read the source and check, for example, that every colour pair reaches a contrast of at least 4.5:1 and that every permission in the manifest is used by some code. The release build is reproducible. I submitted HomeTiles to F-Droid in September 2026, where the review is still open.