Are you bored of your stock Android homescreen? Are you looking for a minimalistic looking launcher to help minimize your daily onscreen times? Look no more, Ratio is here to fix that for you.
Ratio is an Android launcher or home screen replacement, ok it’s actually more than that but essentially at its core its meant to recompartmentalize how you access and consume the things on your phone. But does it really help reduce the screen on time? Maybe, just maybe.
Ratio is a product from Blloc, an electronics firm from Berlin. The launcher was actually extracted and adapted from a phone the company released a few years ago called the Zero 18.
Ratio Launcher
Aesthetically, presented on a straight-up regular black and white UI with a slight yellow accent, Ratio launcher is very pleasing to the eye.
At the moment, the launcher primarily takes the form of two home screens namely the Root and Tiles, with another one in the works called the tree.
A swipe to the left and you are on the Root, a feed of widgets that you can draw up and cast away. This is the simplest page on the launcher. Here you get Ratio’s search bar which is the conduit for widgets.
Type in “Spotify” and you’ll get a widget for Spotify to play songs, tap on the card and you’ll see buttons to like the song and copy its URL to your clipboard. You can also search “Weather Nairobi” and you’ll get current and forecasts of weather conditions for the capital.
You can also pull up tools like a calculator, notepads, and a currency converter or scan a ticket for your next plane, train, or bus and store it there instead.
If you swipe to the right, you find Tiles, here is where all your apps live. Every app must sit in a category folder that the app calls a drawer. Any app that isn’t in a drawer of your creation goes into the generic App Box, there are however no duplicate tiles meaning an app can’t be found in two drawers. Each drawer and app-tile lets you know, right off the bat, how much time you’ve spent within it, so you’re more aware of your app use (or overuse).
Inside these drawers, if you click and hold an app and the launcher will detail the amount of storage it uses, the amount of data it has consumed, a graph with an accurate representation of how long and when you used the app over a period of time.
Ratio launcher can auto-detect and arrange your apps in a relevant general folder, however, you can create your own drawers and relocate apps to any folder you like for accessibility. This arrangement is neat but it is a pain meaning you will most likely go through the process when you genuinely need to, hence less onscreen time.
Basically your cognition path has been wired to hit colors first, then shapes, and then alphabetical text, with Ratio launcher, your app is presented in that gray scale black and white minimalistic design and you might struggle to find some apps, well until you use the launcher for long and memorize where everything is.
Ratio Launcher has a lot of features that I will not get into myself. Here is the app description on the playstore. Open this link on your Android device to install the Ratio launcher from Blloc:
https://blloc.page.link/SAgvYiLtXmzXxrn1A
Tiles
Your apps. Organized like never before.
Over 3700 apps are released every single day. It’s 2020 and your home screen
still hasn’t caught up. Ratio intelligently auto-categorizes your apps for you.
Your screen adapts to your own flow with our drawers feature. Display only the apps relevant to you for each different moment of the day.
Root
All the essentials of your phone, just one tap away
We’ve created custom cards that integrate with your everyday tasks: Calendar,
News, Notes, Todo, Weather, Events, Ride hailing, Search, RSS, Calculator,
Currency, Timer, Stocks, Phone Settings.
And more always in development.
Tree (Coming Soon)
All messaging platforms. Under one roof. Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram,
Facebook Messenger, and more. Brought together for the first time. Stop
endlessly switching between apps. Ratio aggregates and merges conversations across all messaging apps so you’ll never drop the ball again.
Themes
We created modes for every (really, every) situation
Dark mode: Inpired by our original BllocMode designed back in 2016, this
theme balances both contrast and performance.
Sun mode: This mode was created to give you the best possible contrast in
bright environments and even direct sunlight.
Light mode (Coming Soon): By popular request, we’re making Ratio bright and translucent
for the first time. Match the time of day with our new light theme.
Safety First
Your privacy is more important than ever. We take measures to keep it that way.
Local – Nothing leaves your device
No cloud processing, no 3rd party services, no compromises. Ratio computes
everything on your phone.
Privacy: You decide what permissions we have
Ratio gives you full control over the data it can process with a simple UI to
fully revoke access however you see fit. Transparency like never before
Encrypted: For your eyes only
We use state of the art asymmetric 256-bit RSA based dual encryption to protect
your data. We have no master key. You and only you should have access to your data
