6 Power Tips To Get The Most Out Of Aviate Launcher in Android

6 Power Tips To Get The Most Out Of Aviate Launcher in Android

After spending a better part of a year in beta, Aviate is finally ready to take off the training wheels. It is now available to download for free across the globe from the Google Play Store. If you follow the tech blogosphere, you must have read about Aviate, the contextual information homescreen that moulds itself depending on the time of the day and where you are. It was recently bought by Yahoo.

A major part of Aviate is its contextual information. Much like Google Now, this is the part you have little control over. It will work in the background keeping tabs on your phone and will provide you with new and useful information based on its algorithms.

This guide will focus on understanding and customizing the other part of Aviate. The part you can and should customize to better suit your needs.

How It Works

Aviate (free) brings the same contextual and intelligent information as Cover lockscreen, only to your homescreen instead. Aviate knows what kind of apps and information you need at a given time, whether you’re at home or traveling, if you have earphones plugged in and changes its behavior accordingly.

Aviate has a three pane interface. All the contextual goodliness is limited to the first pane. It will be the default pane when new updates are available. You can switch between the five available presets from the sidebar.

The middle pane is your homescreen. By default it only has a wallpaper and five icons at the bottom of the screen. You can swipe up from the icons to interact with your favorite contacts.

The last pane is the app drawer but not your traditional one. Here your apps are grouped according to categories.

Now that we know what Aviate is and how it works, let’s get started with making it better suited for our needs.

1. Customizing Widget Placement

You can add widgets to the scrollable contextual pane or even the static middle homescreen.

The problem with the static middle homescreen is that it is static. No matter how many widgets you add, it won’t scroll down (ultimately resulting in the mess shown in the screenshots below). The middle screen is a nightmare for widgets so don’t install any there.