Go Launcher EX
Let’s say you’ve bought or been gifted a brand new Kindle Fire. These are great devices built using one of the most popular mobile operating systems around, the omnipresent Android. But when you boot it up for the first time, you’re puzzled: this Kindle Fire doesn’t seem to work like your Android smartphone. In fact, the home screen looks about as far from your usual Android interface as you can imagine. That’s because Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets run on a forked version of Android. The guts are the same, but the UI is very different, made that way in order to give you just the experience Amazon wants you to have.
What’s the solution? Simple: Go Launcher EX.
The Go Launcher Dev team makes a whole suite of apps and widgets for your Android devices, accessible through its own curated app store, along with other developers’ games and applications. But Go Launcher EX itself is probably the most useful for device owners who wound up with forked versions of the OS, since it basically replicates the usual Android experience with a whole host of customization options. Gone is the weird bookshelf interface Kindle Fire users so loathe, replaced with a home screen that much more closely resembles the one you might find on any traditional Android device.
In essence, it offers up a more customizable interface for your gadget if you don’t like the one it came with. And it’s not just for making the Kindle Fire more useable—you can download Go Launcher EX on any Android device to switch things up.
There are thousands of different themes that have been made to work with the launcher, and users can usually choose from lots of different transition animations for when you flick between one screen and the next. Using Go Launcher EX is a great way to spruce up your smartphone and experiment.
If you want to give Go Launcher EX a try, it’s easy to download from the Google Play store. If your Kindle Fire doesn’t play nice with Google, though, you can always side-load it or download it from the web right here.
Key Features
- Tons of options give you way more power over how you interact with your Android phone.
- Can bypass forked versions of Android, particularly on the Kindle Fire line of tablets, giving you a truer mobile computing experience.
- Provides access to its own app store, stocked with thousands of wallpapers, themes, and curated apps.