Xiaomi's POCO F1 was a major head-turned when it launched in India last year with class-leading specs including a Snapdragon 845 SoC, up to 8GB RAM, IR face unlock, a premium kevlar finish special variant and all of this at a price of slightly more than just $300. The POCO Launcher played a central role in the brand's identity which Xiaomi intended to separate from its own MIUI. The launcher brings features like an app vault, color-based sorting, and most importantly an app drawer, which many MIUI users have been asking for, for a long time.
Soon after launching the POCO Launcher exclusively with the POCO F1, the brand released it on the Google Play Store for other Xiaomi as well as non-Xiaomi devices. Over the last year, the launcher has received more than 5 million downloads, and although we understand that these numbers are, partially, because the POCO launcher comes pre-installed on the POCO F1, this popularity warrants unabated development from the Pocophone team. Now, POCO is advertising the next version of the launcher for users to try with exciting sorting features for those of you who prefer app drawer hygiene.
The changelog of the new update to POCO Launcher reflects the following new additions:
- Now you can add, delete, and rename custom app categories. Adding and removing apps from the categories is also supported.
- We made a lot of minor UI improvements.
- We boosted overall performance.
- We fixed some bugs as well.
From within the app drawer, users can swipe right on the main window to find the categorized view for apps. In this, users can long-press on the empty area to enter the editing mode in which the name of the category can be changed and apps can be added or removed from each category. Users can also reorder, hide, or delete categories by going to POCO Launcher Settings>Manage app categories.
Besides this, the transparency of the app drawer's background can now be changed, as well. For now, the slider can only move in steps of 25% but we can hope for the option of fine-tuning in future updates.
Furthermore, the Pocophone team says that the UI and scrolling are much smoother while the performance of the launcher has been improved too. Apart from this, there have been bug fixes for the launcher.
The current changes are available in the beta for POCO Launcher, which you can join by visiting this link. Alternatively, you can download the latest version directly from APK Mirror from this link. You can also share your feedback with the developers of the launcher by heading over to its Settings>About>Help & feedback if you feel that the latest beta can acquire some new and interesting features or fix some existing ones.
This article was updated at 12:29 PM EST on 6/18/19 to correct the fact that POCO Launcher has been in 2.0 beta for a while now, but that the categorization feature is still new.