Stock Android is great, but depending on your particular requirements, a launcher can be a really powerful tool to make your phone more capable and better looking at the same time. You may have finally found an Android launcher worth switching to, but there are some issues that persist across the board.
Your otherwise perfect launcher can easily fall apart when you try multitasking on your Android phone. Every single Android launcher I’ve tried has a problem with the recent apps screen and split-screen mode, and it continues to prevent me from using the launchers I like.
Android launchers are a multitasking nightmare
The moment every launcher starts tripping over itself
Imagine using your preferred launcher and then opening the recent apps screen. There’s a chance your launcher may or may not appear on this screen. If it does, and you accidentally close it, you’re thrown right back to the default launcher until you start the launcher app again. It’s one of the reasons why I prefer to stick to my default Android launcher.
If you try to open two apps in a split-screen configuration, you could be looking at a launcher crash. And it’s not just split-screen. The floating window feature, the ability to open apps in pop-up view, app-switching gestures, all of these multitasking features tend to misbehave the moment you put a custom launcher in charge of your home screen.
The severity of the problem varies wildly depending on your device and Android version. On some phones, especially Pixels, these issues are minor annoyances that you’ll come across every once in a while when switching apps. Mind you that they still break the user experience, but not enough to make
Some of these issues have been addressed in Android 16 and continue to improve. Regardless, as long as you’re using a custom launcher, there will be a few glitches you’ll have to face when dealing with multiple apps.
Why can’t launchers get a basic feature right
The flaw that ruins even the best launchers
Pankil Shah/MakeUseOfCredit: Pankil Shah/MakeUseOf
This isn’t a limitation of third-party launchers either; it’s a Google design decision. Instead of letting third-party launchers fully manage these functions, Google centralized them in the system launcher.
So, while your custom launcher can handle the home screen just fine, the moment you swipe up to see recent apps or try to activate the split screen, the system is consulting with the default launcher on your phone.
Inevitably, your custom launcher and system launcher end up stepping on each other’s toes, and the system launcher wins because it’s considered the default for several actions. When the two interact, especially when it comes to multitasking features, you get weird glitches like apps disappearing from the recents overview or launchers outright crashing.
Yadullah Abidi / MakeUseOfCredit: Yadullah Abidi / MakeUseOf
There have been improvements to allow custom launchers to work better with your phone without compromising security. However, launchers replace a very basic layer of interactivity in your phone, which means even the smallest glitches will hamper the user experience massively. When these glitches happen every time you’re juggling between apps on your phone, the launcher becomes unusable, no matter how good your homescreen looks.
Band-aid solutions to improve your experience
Temporary fixes for a permanent problem
If you’re determined to use a third-party launcher despite these issues, there are a few options to avoid glitching. You can try force-stopping the default launcher after using the recents overview. If the problems start appearing after a particular update, rolling back to previous launcher versions might also help.
Enabling accessibility permissions for your launcher can also help improve stability. For split-screen mode specifically, enabling the non-resizable in multi-window option in developer options can fix problems for Pixel users.
Amir M. Bohlooli / MakeUseOfCredit: Amir M. Bohlooli / MakeUseOf
However, these are band-aids, not real solutions. This problem can easily be solved if Google treated third-party launchers as genuine alternatives instead of regular apps. The fact that even exceptional launchers like Niagara, Microsoft Launcher, and even the now obsolete Nova launcher run into issues like this just brings down what are otherwise excellent pieces of software for your phone.
Some launcher developers have managed to work around these issues more gracefully than others. Kvaesitso launcher had almost no issues with multitasking, but it comes with its own set of problems and isn’t an easily accessible app via the Google Play Store.
System stability is better than a custom launcher
Predictability can save your sanity
These issues aren’t big, and no launcher will leave your phone unusable for the reasons described above. You might not even have noticed them before, or the launcher you use doesn’t have these problems at all. Regardless, they make installing any custom launcher a gamble, which eventually sends me back to my phone’s default launcher.
If multitasking is a critical part of your workflow, you will have the best user experience with your stock launcher. If you can live with the occasional crash and frustration that comes with it, third-party launchers are an excellent way of adding new customization options and capabilities to your phone.
Until third-party launchers can be fully integrated into Android’s multitasking and system architecture, these problems are just the price of admission. It’s disappointing, but I’ll take it any day over a closed OS that doesn’t give you options in the first place.
