It’s just turned 3:00 in the afternoon, and I was alternating between the couch and the computer desk, racking my brain on what to do. With no ongoing projects — a few ideas have been bouncing around, yet none has grabbed me so far, and I had nothing else in a state where I could just slip on some music or a podcast and work on — and seeing a few others make similar posts on their blogs, I’d figured I talk about my home screens.

I realised that I haven’t actually done this before, mainly because my home screens change very slowly (the background hardly ever). Dramatic changes usually come about when I’m setting up a new phone.

And yet, I do want to talk a little about the apps I have at the moment, and I did want to make sure I had a record of how the home screens looked. And seeing that I needed to keep myself occupied doing something, now is as good a time as any.

Screen One

This screen contains two widgets — the date and weather widget at the top, and the calendar widget on the right — plus a small collection of apps placed deliberately where they are. The apps I have here are not necessarily the most used (although two of them are) but I like having easy access to them for various reasons.

Aside from the widgets, the apps I have on this screen — from left to right, top to bottom — are as follows:

• Micropub Checkin: A silly little Flutter app I used for adding check-ins to lmika.day. The apps in a bit of a neglected state, but I still use it as I get value from tracking places I’ve been.
• Strata: The note’s app from Micro.blog. This is where I write my short-term notes. I use Google Keep for shopping lists, but everything else goes here.
• Alto: A music app I wrote, and the main music app I listen to.
• Pocket Casts: The podcast player app I use. Apart from the web-browser, this and Alto are two of the most used apps I have on my phone.
• VSReader: Another silly little Flutter app. This is a test build for an RSS reader I was working on a couple of months ago. It’s been a while since I’ve opened this, and I probably should just kill it given that I haven’t made any recent changes to it.
• Google Wallet: Google’s digital wallet (well, at least their current iteration of their digital wallet). I use it mainly for my train ticket but I do have my credit card in there, just in case I walk out without my “real” wallet.

The items in the dock are as follows:

• Phone: My family and I still use the phone quite frequently so this app has remained in the dock since I set the phone up.
• Messages: This is Android’s messaging app. Much like the phone, I communicate with family mostly via SMS, and now RCS, messages.
• Play Store: I rarely go to the Play Store, so there’s no real need for this icon to be here. But I haven’t got around to removing it yet.
• Vivaldi: My web browser of choice.
• The right most icon changes based on the last used app, which I’m not a huge fan of, as it occasionally changes just as I go to tap it and I launch the wrong app by mistake.

Screen Two

A grab-bag of apps I frequently use. Some of them probably should be on the first screen, but since real-estate is at a bit of a premium I just keep them here, and swipe over when I need them.

From left to right, top to bottom, the apps on this screen is as follows:

• PTV: The Victorian public transport app. I usually use it to know the arrival time of the tram I take going home. Also useful for trip planning.
• Plex: I generally don’t watch things on my phone, but before I got my Nvidia Shield, I used this Plex app to Chromecast shows to the TV. It was never great at it though, as it sometimes disconnected from the Chromecast session while the video was running, leaving me with no means of stopping it until I unplugged the Chromecast.
• Kindle: Kept here as I occasionally use it to read books if I’ve read through my RSS feeds.
• ChatGPT: I don’t use ChatGPT on my phone that often, but it does occasionally come in useful when a web-search proves fruitless.
• FastMail: My email provider of choice. Given how often I use it, this is arguably one of those apps that should be on the first screen.
• Pager Duty: The twenty-four hours on-call paging software I had to use for work. I’m no longer on the on-call roster so it’s probably something I can remove.
• WhatsApp: What I use for messaging friends. I don’t like the fact that I have a Meta app on my phone, but that’s what my friends chose to use so I’m stuck with it (it’s also better than Viber, which is what we used before).
• WireGuard: Personal VPN, although I’m currently not using WireGuard for anything right now. I like to keep it mainly because I like the logo.
• Discord: I’m a member of a few Discord servers, but I use the mobile client mainly to check into the Hemispheric Views Discord.
• Notion: Where I store my “long term” notes, at least for now.
• Tusky: Mastodon client.
• Splitwise: Group expense management and splitting app. This was useful during our European trip last year, where each of us would take in turn to pay for the group.
• SunSmart: Used to track the current and forecasted UV index. Useful around this time of year if I’m planning to be outside for an extended period of time.
• Micro.blog: The Micro.blog app, although I occasionally use the web version too.
• 1Password: My password manager of choice.
• Realestate.com: Used to browse real-estate, out of curiosity more than anything else.
• Spotify: My “secondary” music app. I don’t use it for anything that I regularly listen to, but it’s occasionally useful for those once-off tracks.
• Google Authenticator: Where I keep my 2FA codes.
• Day One: Before I moved to a web-based journalling app, I used this Day One client for writing journal entries. It wasn’t perfect: there was always syncing delays to/from the Apple platform instances of Day One. But it was fine.
• Slack: Used mainly for work.
• Camera: I’m not sure why I have this here, since I almost always use the double power-button tap to bring up the camera. I guess I moved it here from screen one and never removed it.

Screen Three

This is a screen I hardly ever used, as it’s mainly reserved for apps that are useful while travelling. The Booking.com app and Emirates apps I can probably remove: I was using them mainly to track flights and accomodation during my European trip last year.

The only one worth keeping is Airalo, which allows you to buy and setup data SIMs that work overseas. This has been really useful to me during my last couple of trips, and I hope to keep using it for trips in the future. It doesn’t offer a lot of data, but any data is better than zero data, as my friends — who continued asking to use my data when we’re out of WiFi range — can attest.