A Healthy Home Screen
By: Peter Huber
Tags: Smartphones, Homescreen, Android

A Healthy Home Screen

📝 To access all of the following features right away, download the latest Niagara Launcher Beta build. Because it’s brand-new, it can be unstable. We’ll distribute a stable update through Google Play in around two weeks.

Every New Year, we showed our users how many apps they launched. While this should initially just serve as a fun fact, many of us, including myself, were shocked how much we use our smartphones (>6000 launches in just two months, in my case). Because the home screen is the first app you see every time you use your phone, I believe Niagara Launcher has a great opportunity to contribute to healthy phone usage. That’s why we’re working on focusing more on, well, focus and are starting to incorporate digital wellbeing features in our app, you can even try out the first one today!

Digital Wellbeing Initiative

Analyzing and adapting smartphone use together with the University of Augsburg

To understand how activity and your habits can contribute to a healthy home screen, we’re working together with the University of Augsburg and its Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing We’re planning to publish our findings in a few months as part of my bachelor’s thesis and develop features to improve your wellbeing.

If you want, you can contribute by automatically sharing how you use your phone and stats about your physical activity. Participating is voluntary, not the default, and you can request your data or leave anytime. We want to be as transparent as possible about the initiative and created a dedicated page that is all about what data we collect and how we protect your privacy while doing that. For example, we analyze what types of notifications you receive to measure how they affect phone usage. However, we don’t include any of their content:

What you see vs. what remains hidden from us when you participate in the Digital Wellbeing Initiative.

For the first message from Lily, the data we can see would look similar to this:

As part of our promise to be transparent, we explain the purpose of every field here.

Notification Summary

Reduce interruptions without missing out — Requires Android 8+

Speaking of notifications, here’s our first experimental feature of the initiative: Batching non-urgent notifications to reduce interruptions and take care of them at once. You can enable it from Niagara Launcher’s settings > Features > Notifications > Notification summary.

Fun fact: During development, Apple announced a very similar feature for iOS 15. While we worked on the feature long before the announcement (but maybe we copied their name), we’re happy that we seem to be on the right track and hope that Android soon follows and natively integrates notification summaries next year.

Before I tell you how to use notification summaries, please let me first explain their purpose.

Why turning off all notifications is not a good idea

According to many digital wellbeing guides and gurus, you should turn off almost all of your notifications “to regain your control over your phone.” I believe that turning off notifications isn’t inherently good for your productivity but is often recommended because there is no better option.

See, notifications were originally seen as a way to check your phone less. They save you time by not having to check your apps for updates constantly. So while you can reduce notifications (external trigger), you’re not necessarily better off. You’re likely to check the app more often because of curiosity or FOMO — fear of missing out (internal trigger). Research by Duke University indicates that it’s instead better to have your notifications delivered in batches a couple of times per day. By bundling notifications, you take care of them at once and reduce stress without missing out.

Importance vs. urgency

To assist you in deciding which notifications to be included in your summary, we created a guide inspired by the Eisenhower matrix (a task prioritization framework):

We differentiate between urgency and importance. Urgent notifications demand your immediate attention, while important ones help you achieve your personal goals. Apps often try to get your attention with synthetic urgency (e.g., “flash sale, x is now 50% off while stocks last!”), but don’t be deceived and act based on how important the notification is first.

Three steps for better notifications

Disable non-important notifications. I recommend opening Android’s notification settings and check your recent notifications. Then turn off all notifications that are neither important nor urgent. You can also quickly disable notifications by long-pressing them in Niagara Launcher or in Android’s notification shade. Summarize important but non-urgent notifications. To do that, open Niagara Launcher’s settings > Features > Notifications > Notification summary. Notifications you include in your summary will be batched together and delivered and arrive approximately six hours after you closed your last notification summary so that you can check them around three times a day. Take extra care of conversations. Because messages from friends and family tend to be more important during leisure time, I recommend not including them in your summary but turning on Android’s Focus mode during work hours with messenger apps suspended.

Bonus: Redesigned Notifications

Media notification/widget

This is a small change, but rounding the widget’s artworks and playback buttons makes it feel much more integrated into Niagara Launcher.

Group conversations

Group chats are now showing the avatars of individual users (supported on devices running Android 9 or higher — we’ll generate fallback icons for older Android versions).

Pop-up notifications

Pop-ups now show which apps inside them have notifications. Perfect for grouping messengers:

Additional tweaks

Preventing Android’s back gesture and Niagara’s alphabet scrolling to overlap. If you have gesture navigation turned on, you might have noticed that Android’s back gesture triggered while scrolling through the alphabet. With v1.3, this is a thing of the past.

If you have gesture navigation turned on, you might have noticed that Android’s back gesture triggered while scrolling through the alphabet. With v1.3, this is a thing of the past. Deleting folders more easily. You can now directly delete a folder with a long press and a tap on “Delete.”

You can now directly delete a folder with a long press and a tap on “Delete.” Letting you enable the media player without notification previews. Please see this ticket for more details.

Please see this ticket for more details. Fixed pop-up widget issues. Sometimes pop-up widgets didn’t refresh when reopening them.

📝 To access all of the following features right away, download the latest Niagara Launcher Beta build. Because it’s brand-new, it can be unstable. We’ll distribute a stable update through Google Play in around two weeks.

Thank you very much for reading,

Peter