MINIMALIST HOMESCREEN FOR ANDROID
Ratio, A New Minimalist Launcher
Take A Look At This Company’s Approach To Reducing Your Phone Usage
Blloc — it’s a company that you probably haven’t heard of before. They’re a Berlin based startup, who made a phone called the Blloc Zero 18, a phone that they marketed as the “minimalist smartphone”.
It was a pretty average midrange phone, with a design that was reminiscent of the iPhone X (which is something that a lot of budget Androids tend to do). It’s major standout features however, were what they called ‘Blloc Mode’. It’s a mode where, when enabled, the regular homescreen transforms into one made of tiles, with your most used apps being tiles and notifications. It’s a completely rethought Android experience, and a cool one at that.
According to Blloc, the phone ended up selling out, but now it seems that they are taking a turn to focus on bringing the software features of the Blloc Z18 onto other devices via an Android launcher, as many have requested it.
Introducing Blloc Ratio, a launcher that is designed to help you use your phone more intentionally so that you don’t find yourself having spent hours on a distracting app.
Home Page
It’s made up of two pages — the Root and the Drawers. The Root is a page where you can add little widgets such as the weather, RSS feeds, conversion tools, Spotify playback and more. The Root is primarily a page that’s designed to have information at a glance so that you can use apps less and get the info you need quickly.
The Drawers on the other hand, are essentially an app drawer, but not in the traditional sense. The apps are automatically sorted into labels such as ‘Essential’, ‘Favourites’, ‘Most Used’ and ‘Other’, and as far as I can tell, these categories are made using your usage data (which is something that you give them permissions for when installing Blloc).
The apps within the drawers can be easily rearranged, and the button at the bottom right corner (when held) brings up three options : Focus Mode, Sun Mode, and the option for a new drawer.
The Focus Mode at the time of writing does not do much apart from putting a border around all the apps and increasing their visibility, but more features are being added month after month.
The Sun Mode is a button that inverts the colours of the launcher, making it white overall, and thus increasing visibility.
Overall, the home interface is nice, clean, and minimal.
Customisation
This launcher provides a customisation experience that I haven’t quite seen this well implemented in other launchers.
Examples of this are the various options that it provides you with to customise on an app-by-app basis.
As seen in the screenshot on the left, when you hold and release an app in the Drawers, it brings up this app dashboard of sorts, showing you a wide variety of data such as how much storage and mobile data the app has used, your usage time, as well as extra options such as force stopping/deleting the app, changing the icon of it and the rotation.
And then at the bottom of this dashboard are where I think the coolest features are: you can enable greyscale on an app by app basis, you can hide it from the app drawer so that its harder to get to, you can lock the app with biometrics and you can mute the sound in the app.
The fact that this launcher provides you with the ability to have it on an app by app case is something that I found very useful, as it meant that I could have certain apps such as the camera app set to always have colour, whereas I could have apps that distract me (Instagram, Reddit) to be greyscale so that I got discouraged from scrolling through them. I found it to be quite effective and well implemented.
The biometric locking of each app was something that I also found to be implemented well compared to other Android launchers. It worked smoothly and always locked whenever my device went to sleep.
How Effective Was It?
To be completely honest, going into this launcher, I was not expecting it to have a significant impact on my phone usage, but after enabling the app-by-app greyscale, I found it to be working quite well.
I was using Instagram and Reddit much less than before, mostly due to the monochrome effect which a) made the content of the app less appealing to look at but also b) triggered me to think about why I was using my phone, and subsequently, be more intentional with my phone use.
One thing I did notice was a slightly increased battery drain, but that might be different for others, as I’m on a Google Pixel 2 XL that’s rooted.
Another small thing that I hope Blloc adds down the road is Quickswitch support — it’s a small thing (most people won’t even notice it) but it would go a long way in making the experience smoother for users who are on stock Android 10 or are rooted like myself. [Quickswitch is a Magisk (root) Module that enables for smooth integration between the recents page and a custom launcher.]
Verdict
Overall, I thought that Blloc Ratio was a great Android launcher, and it certainly delivered on what it aimed to do. It really made me think about my phone usage, and in general this has been something highly beneficial for me, as it has made me be more intentional with the time I spend on my phone, thus making each minute on my phone one that brings me value.
Ratio had a well implemented monochrome system and theme that worked the way they intended it to, and I highly appreciated the fact that they gave quite a decent amount of control over this feature to the user, something that allows for a custom fit for each person.
However, as it is still an early release, it does have some issues with stability and smoothness such as the recents issue I mentioned above (which also sometimes causes the launcher to freeze up, something that can only be remedied by going to the homescreen) as well as the issue with the battery usage. It is still in early release though, which is something to be kept in mind.
We can only wait and see from now to see what other updates Blloc brings to the table with their Ratio launcher.
Want To Try It Out?
Sign up for a Blloc invitation code here.
