Microsoft Launcher

Review by eFreeware

Microsoft Launcher is a free home screen replacement for Android, published by Microsoft Corporation and available on Google Play since late 2015. Instead of the grid your phone shipped with, it puts a customizable surface in front of you, with a personal feed for calendar entries, to-do lists and Sticky Notes sitting alongside your apps. It has been installed more than 50 million times and holds a 4.7 average from over 1.7 million ratings.

The main reason to consider it is that it treats the home screen as a place to get things done rather than just a shelf of icons. You can shape the look with icon packs and wallpapers, and you can shape the function with a feed that surfaces the day's commitments. That combination is what separates it from launchers that only change colors and fonts.

It is also free, with no ads and no in-app purchases, which matters for an app that sits permanently in front of everything else you do. Nothing in the way it is distributed suggests a catch, and the developer has kept it updated, most recently in May 2026.

A home screen you can actually redesign

The customization runs deeper than swapping a wallpaper. Microsoft Launcher supports custom icon packs and adaptive icons, so you can give the whole phone a consistent look rather than a patchwork of styles from different developers. If you have already invested in an icon pack you like, this is the launcher that will let you use it properly.

Wallpapers come from two directions. You can let Bing supply a fresh image each day, which keeps the home screen changing without any effort on your part, or you can choose your own photos. The daily option is the more interesting one: it turns a small, fixed part of your phone into something that shifts over time.

The dark theme is worth mentioning on its own. It is built for low light and night use, and it follows Android's own dark mode settings, so the launcher does not fight the rest of the system when you switch themes. For anyone who uses their phone in bed or in dim rooms, that consistency is the point.

Gestures round out the customization. Swiping, pinching and double tapping on the home screen are all supported as ways to move around and reach things. An optional screen lock and a recent apps gesture rely on the Accessibility Service permission.

The feed as a lightweight productivity hub

The personalized feed is the feature that gives Microsoft Launcher its character. It is designed to show your calendar, your to-do lists and your Sticky Notes in one place, so a glance at the home screen tells you what is coming up rather than making you open three separate apps.

That is a modest but genuinely useful idea. If your day is shaped by meetings and short tasks, having them visible the moment you pick up the phone reduces the number of times you unlock it just to check. Sticky Notes in particular works well as a capture point for something you need to remember and would otherwise lose.

The feed can also carry personalized news, which the developer added as part of the rebuild on a new codebase. Whether that suits you depends on how you use your home screen: some people want headlines one swipe away, and others will treat the feed purely as a calendar and task view.

It is worth being clear about the scale of this. This is not a full productivity suite, and the feed is a summary layer rather than a workspace. What it does is put the information you already track in front of you more often, which is a smaller promise than it might sound and a more reliable one.

Search, notes and the permissions behind them

Several launcher features lean on Bing, including search, chat and visual search. Speech-to-text is available for those features as well as for To Do and Sticky Notes, which is what the microphone permission is for. Contacts are used to search for people through Bing Search, and the phone permission allows you to call a contact with a swipe.

Other permissions map to specific cards and effects. Location feeds the weather widget, calendar access populates the calendar card in the feed, and photo and video access covers wallpapers, the blur effect, visual search and the display of recent items and backups. On Android 13 and up, all-file access takes the place of the photo and video permissions. Image notes in Sticky Notes and image search both draw on the camera.

What I appreciate here is that the permissions are presented as optional. You can keep using the launcher without agreeing to them, though some functions will be restricted. That is a more reasonable arrangement than a hard gate, and it means you can decide feature by feature how much you want to hand over.

Notifications are requested so the launcher can tell you about updates and app activity. None of this is unusual for a launcher that wants to show calendar data, weather and search results, but it is a long list, and it is sensible to read it before you agree to everything at once.

Setting it up and moving between phones

Getting started is deliberately low-friction. Once Microsoft Launcher is your home screen, you can start from scratch with the apps you like or bring in your existing layout. If you decide it is not for you, you can switch back to your previous home screen.

Backup and Restore is the feature that makes this portable. You can move your setup between phones or try out different home screen arrangements, with backups stored either locally or in the cloud. For anyone who changes devices every couple of years, that removes the tedious part of rebuilding a home screen from scratch.

There are two requirements to keep in mind. Android 7.0 or later is required, and your PC home screen is not mirrored on your phone. New apps still come from Google Play, so this is a phone-side experience rather than a mirror of your desktop.

Downloading it lets you swap out the default launcher or switch back and forth between launchers, which is a gentler way to try something new than committing outright.

Where it lands for different kinds of users

This fits best with people who treat their phone as a working tool as much as a personal one. If your calendar and task list drive your day, a feed that shows them without an extra tap is a real improvement, and the customization options mean the look does not have to feel corporate.

It also suits anyone who likes to tinker. Icon packs, adaptive icons, Bing's daily image and gesture controls give you plenty to adjust, and the backup system means that tinkering is not a one-way door. People who prefer to set a phone up once and never think about it again will find less here to care about, though the import option makes the initial switch painless.

The permission list is the main thing to weigh. A launcher sits at the center of your phone, and this one asks for access to contacts, calendar, location, camera, microphone, photos and notifications to power specific features. If you are comfortable granting those for a feed and a weather widget, the trade is straightforward; if not, you can decline and accept the reduced feature set.

The 4.7 average across more than 1.7 million ratings suggests a large number of people have been satisfied enough to say so, which is a reasonable signal for an app in a category where a bad update is immediately visible.

A considered pick for an organized phone

Microsoft Launcher is a free, ad-free home screen replacement that does two jobs well: letting you control how your phone looks, and putting your calendar, tasks and notes where you will see them. The icon and wallpaper options are broad, the dark theme follows the system, and Backup and Restore makes the setup portable between devices.

The caveats are the ones the app itself sets out. It needs Android 7.0 or higher, it does not mirror your PC, and several features depend on permissions you may or may not want to grant. None of those are surprises, and the fact that the launcher still works without consenting to everything softens the last one considerably.

If you want your home screen to be both attractive and mildly useful, this is a sensible thing to install, and the option to toggle back to your old launcher makes trying it a low-risk decision. If you want a launcher that stays out of the way entirely, the feed and the permission requests will feel like more than you asked for.