Nokia's New Homescreen Replacement App for Android | Hacker News Reader

Nokia's New Homescreen Replacement App for Android

zlauncher.com

50 pointspyrmont48 comments

So, where's the proof that this is from Nokia? I can't find a reference to this on a pre-existing Nokia property, the entire thing is on zlauncher.com except where they link to generic Nokia privacy policies and in one spot say to email press@nokia.com - so nothing that indicates they actually have access to Nokia.com. They've created a brand new twitter account that doesn't appear to have been acknowledged by any existing accounts. It seems weird to me. I don't really believe that its not Nokia, but it is enough uncertainty that I'm not going to install it.

That is weird.

Also:

- They don't list Nokia X in the supported (tested) devices section[0].

- SSL certificate doesn't belong to Nokia

- Whois records are hidden trough proxy, doesn't sound like something a company like Nokia would do

- They belong to Microsoft now, I don't think Microsoft would allow them to launch this, if this the Mobile Devices section of Nokia.

- Domain was bought from GoDaddy. Nokia, like most of the big companies, uses MarkMonitor.

[0] http://feedback.zlauncher.com/knowledgebase/articles/374249-...

EDIT: This seems to be a project by John Kneeland. https://twitter.com/SirKneeland http://kneeland.me/about/

I found his e-mail in the Google+ login app.

EDIT2: They claim to be the real Nokia, the part outside of Microsoft. https://twitter.com/SirKneeland/status/479686206318342144

in case someone is looking for it, here is the new Nokia website: http://company.nokia.com/en

yes, they share the nokia.com top domain, however they are now separate, since the sale to Microsoft completed in 25 April this year.

Hi, John Kneeland here. I am a Nokia employee (Googling me enough should prove that) and PM on the Z Launcher team.

We are indeed the real Nokia, the part outside of Microsoft. :)

I was going to remove that "claim" part but it was too late.

I don't use Android but this looks like a really good project. It's also good to know that Nokia we knew and loved is still creating consumer software.

One of my favorite things about android is some of the high-quality UI modifications that are out there. I've been using Cover for a while and couldn't go back to the default lock screen, it's just too useful.

Also been playing around with Aviate, but to more mixed results.

Between things like that and Facebook chat heads, I feel like Android is the place to be for high-productivity smartphone users.

I tried Aviate but the UI made me uncomfortable. This launcher looks great to me. Will give it a try soon.

Cover looks cool. Seems like the sort of thing amazon would like to launch next - with a quick launch button to it's flow app - as a way to spread the new firefly button("push to visual search") functionality faster.

Cover looks very nice, but I won't install it as I don't have a high degree of trust of the app with my data

I was close to install it, then I read their ZLauncher Privacy Policy and I discovered they read your text messages and call logs, and I abandoned it. I guess, trust really affects our perception of a system, and our willingness to share personal information with it. Unfortunately, if there is no trust, the relationship/interaction man-machine will never achieve its full potential.

Machine learning is sort of hard to do without corpus.

I bet money, it's simply most frequent app and contact called.

As if no other organizations are reading them.

As if sharing with one organization means you want to share with all of them.

Really? Because the stall for me was that "sign in with Google+" demands permission to read my email address book.

"Fuck" and "you" are the only things that come to mind there.

The demanded google OAuth scopes are:

data-scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.profile.emails.read"

as seen in the page source code. Not your address book.

How did you think that it would suggest you who to call or notify you of incoming messages?

By not having INTERNET permission, so users can be somehow assured their data's more likely to stay with them. Why the launcher would need one?

Android really needs a sane custom permission system and some content provider protocol standardization (like "this app provides weather data" and "this app may access any providers that provide store prices") and a package manager that support dependencies on them (similarly, "this app needs a news headlines provider").

....literally, what? It's like complaining that the contacts app has permissions to read your contacts. It's a launcher man, of course it needs to read your call logs and messages, what's so upsetting about this?

They not only access that information (locally, on-device), but may send it:

> When you use the Service, this information may be sent to Nokia for the purpose of improving the Service. You can choose the level at which you participate in the development of Nokia’s products and services. You may disable the collection of information by changing the settings of the Service.

https://www.zlauncher.com/privsupp.html

I see there's an option user can disable this behavior, but who knows whenever it'll transfer this data right on startup before you have the chance to opt out?

Needs a G+ login, so it's inaccessible (and as others wrote: Probably wouldn't work on a rooted phone anyway).

Lack of support for rooted devices probably rules out a whole lot of potential first-adoptors

Nothing worse than systems which force you to use a Google account to log in.

I'm not very well versed with Android related things, but isn't a Google account required for Android anyway? If so, using it to sign in to an Android app seems like a reasonable choice.

> isn't a Google account required for Android anyway?

Not strictly speaking, no. You do need to sign in to a Google account to access the Play Store, which is synonymous with Android for most people, but it doesn't need to be a Google+ account.

Even given that though, the vast majority of Android apps don't require you to sign in with a Google account (or a Google+ account) and thus don't have access to the data associated with it. For a lock screen app to even require signing in is pretty strange.

You have to download and install the APK manually. With the ease of publishing something to Google Play, why haven't they done so? Is it just to limit initial deployment to people who know how to do this?

Also "Sorry, we are not currently supporting rooted devices". I wonder why.

This is a common practice for such pre-releases. Though they could have added the APK on the Google Play store but then they will have to introduce a new internal API where they keep a check on the pre-release users. Can be done but I think this manual distribution can be used for many other things!

But it's annoying that they do not want to support rooted devices!

I'm on my first Android phone, never installed any mods, and it seemed quite simple to me. Possibly even more simple than using Play.

The flow can be more simple, as you suggest, but what you lose is the assurance from Google that this app is from the publisher it's marked as being from and all of the surrounding mechanisms like push updates that it makes no sense to reimplement on a per app basis.

Google Play is accessible only if you hook your Android device to a Google account AND you Andorid device vendor has put up the $$ to use the proprietary Google apps like Play.

The real question is why so many apps are distributed only through Play, excluding privacy-conscious users and open source Android devices.

Nobody said they shouldn't have provided an APK.

I'm also curious why they don't "support" rooted devices to the extent they try to detect it and refuse to start. It's not that there's anything needs to be done to support them - they're no different from any other devices, just provides end-user a method to gain uid 0.

Is Nokia hiding something or what?

I tried it. It's nice in some ways, but horribly limited.

It defaults to 4 icons at the bottom for the dialer, two of which weren't my defaults (for browser and SMS app). By default I run with 6 icons at the bottom, and another six or so that I go to all the time.

It doesn't allow widgets (I have one set up to allow me to toggle wifi and one for a torch).

I can see some people loving the simplicity, but for me it's just not going to work.

I'm betting they'll add the option to change the defaults at the bottom. Most launchers allow that now, so hopefully they'll follow.

Sadly, the launcher tells us it doesn't support rooted devices. Given that this is a limited release to presumably early adopters, I find this not only annoying but counter-intuituve. sigh

Does it actually refuse to launch if your device has root?

Yes. RootCloak works though.

Well, that answers my next question: is there a tool that prevents apps from detecting root?

First thing that came to my mind: great! A new launcher from Nokia!

Downloaded, installed (these permissions are fine for a launcher app) and tried for 5 minutes. Concept is cool but it's really hard to figure out what are the improvements.

I can do the same (searching apps) just typing in to the google search bar, which is more effective than gestures..

direct download of the APK is here

http://apps.goodereader.com/android-apps/personalization-and...

"Call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Palmer " :)

Hmm not sure about the permission for dialling out...

agreed. There is absolutely no proof that this is Nokia and the key is signed by goDaddy.

Sounds fishy.

This is standard practice for launchers, it allows you to add widgets with direct call buttons for contacts.

Does anyone have the md5sum for the apk?

MD5 (zLauncher.apk) = ed8a71a362fe08f614aa79ffb2d77014

Thanks, I found one on a dodgy link which didn't have this md5 but have now persuaded it to download from zlauncher's site. It's freaking awesome. :D

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