Yahoo’s Aviate Is a Smart, Simple Take on the Android Homescreen

Yahoo

Aviate is a slick rethinking of the Android homescreen experience, and it’s now available for the masses—along with some useful new features.

The launcher blends Google Now-like smarts, personalization, and organization into its three neatly organized homescreens, two of which are markedly different than what you’ll see in Android.

The main screen is dominated by a large image, with five app icons populating the bottom of the screen. Swipe to the right, and you’re taken to a screen of your apps, organized neatly by “collection.” Social, music, productivity, and transit apps, for example, are each lumped together automatically by category. When you download a new app, it’s slotted straight into the appropriate collection. Here Aviate also recommends apps you should try based on your usage patterns.

The main homescreen also houses an icon at the top of the display that changes throughout the day depending on the time and where you are. This is basically a hint of Aviate’s “smart” features, which are accessed with a swipe from the left of the screen. There, much like Google Now, Aviate aggregates all sorts of relevant information to your current location and situation, disambiguated from their original apps so you don’t have to tap and swipe a dozen times to get at it.

In the morning, for example, this screen shows you how much sleep you got, how long it estimates your commute will take, the weather, and what meetings are on the calendar for the day. When you’re at work (detected based on your location), your calendar dominates the screen, with quick buttons for sending an email or creating a new calendar event at the top. If you’re at a restaurant, Aviate populates this screen with information from Yelp, tips from Foursquare, and access to other restaurant apps on your handset.

As for the calendar experience, Aviate was able to leverage technology from Incredible Labs (both companies were acquired by Yahoo in January) to make it more functional. The calendar lets you do things like dial into a conference call straight from this interface, pull in map directions for a meeting, and send a message to meeting participants to tell them you’re running late.

Another convenient feature in Aviate is how easy it is to access the people you talk to most. By swiping up from the bottom of the screen, you get access your eight favorite contacts, based on how often you interact with them. Below that, you’ll see your four most recent contacts. Tap their circular profile image and you can easily launch a Google Hangout with them, or give them a call.

Aviate’s user interface seems like it would really streamline your mobile experience, making it easier to access the information you need, when you need it, as well as the apps and people you most want to interact with.

Aviate launched as an invite-only beta back in October, but is available from Google Play for all Android users today.