There are many great Android launchers to choose from, and the popular ones are made by dedicated teams of passionate individuals. If you want to make a launcher, you don’t need a team. You just need the passion. That’s something that Stario developer Răzvan Albu has in spades.
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The story behind Stario
Who made it and how it came to be
Albu is a 20-year-old Romanian developer currently studying software engineering in Sweden. It’s a leap he made shortly after launching Stario in 2021. The move to Sweden and putting a launcher on the Play Store seem to be the product of youthful, optimistic hubris.
“[Moving to Sweden] was the most ‘I am 18, what could go wrong?’ thing that I ever did,” he said. Likewise, when discussing the origins of Stario, he’s unabashedly honest. “Stario exists solely because I’m too pretentious and was never content with anything the market had to offer.”
I’m not happy with Stario … but at least I can blame myself.
The idea behind Stario was to create a minimalist launcher without the clutter of a traditional launcher, ideally in the service of enhanced productivity. Whether Stario succeeds at that is a personal opinion. Still, Albu’s side project has over 350,000 downloads on the Play Store, dozens of stars on GitHub, and an active Discord.
“I was in high school back then, and I remember needing a summer project to occupy my free time with,” he told me. “I was really into theming, so I figured you never have enough Android launchers. Maybe some of my ideas might inspire the big players and adopt them!”
Before setting out on his launcher journey, Albu was an aficionado. “I think I went through Nova, Lawnchair, Niagara, Microsoft Launcher, Smart Launcher, Before, Olauncher, [and] Minimalist Phone,” he said. “It’s not that I rejected any of them, but I wasn’t loving them either. I would just jump from one to another.”
Making Stario
It isn’t as easy as you think
He’s currently daily driving the Google Pixel 6a, so I asked him how he feels about the Pixel Launcher and if Stario is a response to any shortcomings he sees there. “The Pixel Launcher is not particularly flawed in any way,” he told me. “Honestly, as an example, after two years of messing around with icons and icon packs, I’m starting to understand why big companies don’t allow icon customization.”
“I started building a launcher to prove that restrictions imposed by big companies are there to save costs or boost sales and that they could easily achieve better products if they cared more about their user base,” he said. However, with the experience gained working with UIs, he gained an insight and appreciation for the work the big players put into it. “I ended up agreeing with them on some [things] and understanding why some features will always be a no-go.”
Given this hard-earned wisdom, how does Albu decide what to keep and what to throw away? “I usually start with what I feel is useful and remove stuff that seems to be there just to hook you,” he told me. The stock Play Store Stario experience is pared down, but minimalism comes at a price. “What I find difficult is having hidden functionality,” he said. “There is a fine line between having an intuitive, minimal interface and straight up confusing the user with advertised functionality that they cannot find.”
Further complicating matters for Albu (and anyone else trying to break new ground in the world of launchers) is years of unconsciously learned muscle memory. “In a way, I love letting the user discover functionality that they didn’t know existed,” Albu told me. “But people are so used to Quickstep-based launchers [the default Android launcher] that you literally have to rewire their brain to work with something new.”
I love familiarity, but that’s also what makes software mundane.
Despite all the work Albu put into Stario, he doesn’t consider it a finished product. “Stario, in its current state, is at most an amalgamation of cool ideas that I’ve had that sometimes work,” he told me, “but I am doing my best to shape it into something great.” And the best part? If you’re a fan of Stario, you don’t have to worry about paying for it. “Stario will always be free,” Albu shared. “The goal of this project was to make something cool, inspire people to create, and maybe influence the market while I’m at it.”
What’s in store for Stario’s future?
Nothing drastic for now. Albu is still in school. “People don’t realize that I’m one student that barely knows what he’s doing, who dreams of achieving something great with his personal project,” he said. But work on Stario is progressing. “Fixing stability issues is my priority, but I have big ideas for Stario,” he shared. What’s next? No one can say, but look at Stario’s GitHub to get an idea.