I’ve changed mobile six times in ten years and I still have the same icons in the same place

Android has changed a lot since its inception, but looking back, what hasn’t changed much is my mobile’s home screen, which has the icons in the same places for a decade. It sounds like a quirk of someone with too much free time, but it all makes sense. More or less.

My first Android phone was a Sony Xperia Mini Pro, a miniature even for the time, with a 3-inch screen. It bears little or no relation to the OnePlus 9R I currently have and its 6.55-inch screen, and yet the essence is basically the samebecause?

It all started with the Xperia Mini Pro

I arrived a little late in the Android world, in 2012, with an Xperia Mini Pro with a QWERTY keyboard and a Nokia XpressMusic 5800 that seemed less and less “intelligent”. The idea was to try to avoid the mobile’s virtual keyboard as much as possible (the Nokia had a stylus), and the mobile was simply adorable.

The Xperia Mini Pro brought a super-heavy layer of customization as usual back then, with all sorts of customizations, Facebook integrations and a launcher with shortcuts on all four corners. At each corner, a folder in which to place shortcuts.

Considering the Xperia Mini Pro had a small 3 inch screen, using folders was a nifty way to have more shortcuts in one place. Not that Sony invented folders, of course, but that first interface conditioned me to think of four groups of icons, each in a corner. And, if possible, that they follow a certain pattern, so as not to drive me crazy.

After much trial and error, the four files were taking shape: one for calls, one for messaging, one for photos and one for mobile settings. I did not imagine then that, ten years later, these four files would continue, in their own way, on my mobile.

The downside of the Xperia Mini Pro is that I barely had a memory (512MB of RAM and 400MB of storage) so it didn’t take long before I had to root it yes or yes, delete apps, make a hole and install various ROMs. Being able to open – and keep open – apps like WhatsApp and Facebook was quite an odyssey, and with the ROM change the Sony layer fell away, replaced by a launcher more similar to Android’s.

With this launcher corners with folders are done: instead it came the dock of a lifetime, with five icons, although one of them is fixed, to open the applications drawer. The transformation was simple: four slots for my usual four folders, but unifying calling apps with messaging (after all, who’s calling on the phone these days?).

So I was left with a folder for calls and chat, another for photos and music, a folderless shortcut for an app I open frequently (Facebook, for example), and a final folder with shortcuts to settings. , Gmail and Google Play. Note that the Xperia Mini Pro has a physical button for the cameraso this shortcut was optional to have as an icon.

Nova soon arrived to make my life easier

The Xperia Mini Pro is one of the phones I’ve enjoyed the most, but it didn’t take long for it to break down and its QWERTY keyboard turned out to be its Achilles heel: Some of its keys were coming off without warning and I even lost the letter N. If you found a letter N of a few millimeters in Madrid in 2013, please I’m still looking for it.

Already in 2013, mobile phones with QWERTY keyboard were disappearing, but I was not yet ready for the virtual keyboard, so I bought a Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G, a model for American carriers: there, mobile phones with keyboard still had some pull. It was something like the Xperia Mini Pro, but big, if that adjective can be used to talk about a 4 inch screen.

Until then, Samsung phones had the infamous TouchWiz, with several extra options that weren’t stock, yes, but pretty ugly, things as they are, and not as nimble as we’d like. The Touchwiz launcher never convinced me, so I ended up replacing it with Nova Launcher, which allowed me to leave everything exactly as it was configured on my old mobile, and more.

My four dock folders and icons were reloading. The only change is that apps to destroy your photos with 200 effects and frames like Pixlr-o-matic, they weren’t as fashionable anymore, so the media folder became the camera icon – more accessible – and the gallery went to the calls and chat folder.

When the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G started having charging issues, my next phones were a Samsung Galaxy A5 and a Samsung Galaxy A5 2017. They no longer had TouchWiz, but instead had what was called Samsung Experience, the big -father of One UI. It was a less ugly system, and its launcher was decent, but once you try Nova, everything else tastes like little.

By using Nova, I was able to reproduce exactly my configuration in these three mobiles four years apart, effortlessly. The only change was that with the advent of swiping to open the app drawer, the old four shortcuts could be five. The Magnificent Five.

The advantage of repeating the pattern is that mobiles change, icons stay in the same place, so that every time I want to open a certain app, my finger knows exactly where to go: it’s been doing the same thing for years. Less time navigating up and down, left and right, searching for a button.

This makes changing mobile is much less traumatic, without having to relearn where things stand. From day one, everything is where it always was. That’s how it tastes Plus, if I ever need to use an old phone to test something, everything stays where it was. My mania, I admit.

Widgets also come with me

After Samsung mobiles, I decided to switch sides and bought a Huawei P30 Lite, in which it took me about zero seconds to change its launcher to Nova and put my icons in the same place as always. With recent versions of Nova, it’s child’s play export your configuration and download it to the new mobile.

Huawei does not allow to unlock the bootloader, so without being able to install a ROM to change its appearance because I was bored with it, I had a lot of fun create custom widgets with KWGT, something that is not difficult, but requires a lot of patience. These widgets ended up being part of my mobile and home screen, not so much for their decorative ability, but for their functionality (several of them include shortcuts to open this or that).

With more and more elaborate own widgets, the inevitable happened: now, in addition to taking the icons with me from one mobile to another, my widgets come with me too. KWGT also lets you export and import your layouts relatively easily, so it doesn’t cost much to reuse your widgets when you switch phones.

We thus arrive at the present, at the OnePlus 9R, where we find the same widgets as in the previous mobile, in addition to the same icons in the dock, exactly the same configuration as in the previous mobile. And it will probably stay that way for a long time.

The shortcuts evolve slightly, local mobile music app gave way to Spotify, the settings shortcuts I had on the Xperia Mini Pro are no longer needed (because most are accessible from quick settings) and the Google Talk app is now WhatsApp, Messenger, LINE, Telegram and many more. others, but essentially everything is the same. And it will go on like this for a long time. It’s probably not the best possible setup, but it’s mine.