Android Wear is Google’s nascent platform for wearable devices. Even though it carries the moniker of Google’s popular mobile platform its not exactly a port, Android Wear was built from the ground up so it doesn’t really emulate the features one would normally find on Android smartphones and tablets. One such feature is the app launcher. Right now users either have to speak out the name of the app they wish to launch on Android Wear or scroll through the entire options list just to get to the apps. To take the pain out of launching apps on Android Wear smartwatches a new launcher has surfaced online. Its the first of its kind for Android Wear devices and it does what its supposed to do very well.
If you have your hands on an Android Wear device, you might know that getting access to the third-party apps you have installed can be quite cumbersome — it definitely requires digging through a few menus to reach them. And most likely, this wasn’t an oversight by the Android Wear team. It wouldn’t make sense to simply have a mini Android smartphone on your wrist, and the Mountain View company instead decided to put Google Now front and center for controlling the device’s functions. Some users are simply not okay with how hard it is to launch installed apps, though. One developer seems to have recognized this as a common complaint and, as is Android and Google fashion, he took to his own programming to fix the problem himself. Enter Wear Mini Launcher, the first Android Wear app that actually introduces an app drawer for housing installed applications, all accessible via a quick gesture. Guessing at Google’s intentions aside, this seems to be a quite useful little tweak. Many Android Wear apps are very powerful, but their practicality was severely damaged by how hard it was to launch them. This hopes to remedy that problem and, while it may go against the voice-controlled philosophy behind Wear, power users will definitely find it useful and having it as an option for launching apps faster is definitely handy. You can grab the app on the Play Store for free, and once you’ve installed it on your phone the above pictured functionality can be activated by doing a quick slide-in gesture from the upper-left corner.