Yahoo Aviate Launcher vs LAUNCHER 8 PRO

Calendar, social, etc, and only shows the five most important apps to you at the time, keeping clutter out of the way.

For each period of the day Aviate provides different apps and information by learning from the users behavior (similar to Google Now). This can come in handy as the apps one would use in the office will most likely be different from the ones they use at home.

Clean and simple visuals allow for easy navigation and understanding of how to interact with the launcher.

The Yahoo Aviate Launcher is completely free to download and use with zero in app purchases to be found.

Swiping to the right opens your spaces (home, work, listening, etc), swiping to the left opens up your apps, and swiping down opens useful contextual information. Luckily all of this swiping works very smoothly.

Aviate supports notification badges for:

• Unread emails via the Gmail app
• Missed calls via your favorite Phone app
• Unread text messages from your default SMS app
• Apps with notification badges on the default Samsung launcher

This allows the user to easily see what apps have what amount of notifications.

Aviate Launcher has built in support for icon packs. this way users can theme their launcher icons to their liking.

Allows one-tap access to create shortcuts to contacts, documents, websites, and even email folders.

Like Windows Phone 8, the design of Launcher 8 consists of brightly colored tiles on either a black or white background. The result is a simple and appealing design. Although simply changing the tile color is not as personal as wallpaper in conventional launchers. Fortunately though any color is possible on Launcher 8 not just the preselected colors on Windows Phone 8.

Windows Phone 8 was never designed to work with Android widgets but that doesn't mean you can't use them with Launcher 8. The developers of Launcher 8 have finally found the right solution to using widgets on the tile interface with new separate pages. In the previous version of the launcher, Launcher 7, the widgets would be squeezed into tiles and the result was rarely good. The new separate widget pages accessible with a swipe to the right are a big improvement.

Launcher 8 uses the same transition effects when opening apps and returning to the home screen as the Windows Phone 8. Not only is this appealing but apps seem to load quicker. The transition to open an app takes a few hundred milliseconds which gives apps extra time to load. The result is an interface that seems quicker than it actually is.

This feature may seem counterproductive at first but it provides a minimalistic appearance that stays true to the original Windows Phone 8. The notification bar will still appear everywhere else on your Android but Launcher 8 will be just tiles.

Launcher 8 supports basic unread counts like phone calls and text messages in the free version.