An Android launcher, which is the app that draws your home screen. Paper replaces the grid of icons with a page: a serif clock, your favourite apps as a list of words, and the book you are reading above them. It costs $6.99 once, with no subscription.

Does Paper need the AI to be useful?

No. The launcher, the reader, the shelf, the app index and every optional line work with nothing configured. The secretary is one page of the app, it is switched off when you install it, and it needs a Google Gemini API key you create yourself.

Can I read ebooks on it?

Yes. Paper opens .epub files, keeps every book you have opened on a shelf with its cover, and remembers each one’s place. Five lines sit above the clock; swipe right and the same book fills the screen at the same word.

Does it really make the whole phone grayscale?

Yes, including the lock screen and other apps, using Android’s own colour-correction setting. It needs one permission granted over adb, once. A phone can issue that grant to itself in about five minutes without a computer.

Does Paper collect any data?

None. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising, no crash reporting. Anything the app knows stays on the phone, and the only network requests it makes are ones you switch on: the weather line, and the secretary if you give it a key.

Which phones does it work on?

Android 13 or newer. It is built for Pixels, and the paper grain needs the shader support that arrived in Android 13.

How is it different from other minimal launchers?

Most of them hide your apps behind a text list. Paper does that too, and then gives the space back to something worth reading: a book, at the exact word you left it. It is also grey by design rather than by theme, and it has no store, no upsell and no second tier.

Is there a free version?

No. One price, everything included, and no trial that expires. Google Play’s own refund window applies if it is not for you.

Paper

A launcher that reads like a page.

Paper is an Android home screen for Pixel phones: grey text on a paper surface, with no icons, no badges and nothing that moves, so nothing on the screen is bidding for you. What is left is the thing you picked the phone up to do, and a book to read when it turns out you didn’t.

$6.99 · what you get ↓ what you get ↓

Try it here The launcher itself, running in this page. Swipe it, or tap a name below to turn to another of its pages.

94%

The Embedded AI Engineer · 7%

14:25

Friday, July 31

Files
WhatsApp ²
Signal

⌕ search

Notes → close the loops

Agent sourcesnew page

· ask, and it answers on this page ·

try “when should I leave for the dentist?”

or “add a task: email the Hort”

august · 357k tokens · ≈ $0.59

tap the right of the book to turn a page · write on the notes sheet · ask the agent something.
four of Paper's pages, with scripted answers. The app also has the index, the shelf, the settings and a dozen optional lines; the agent runs on your own Gemini key.

A shelf, not a file picker

94%

Books add done

The Embedded AI Engineer

Sascha Heyer

reading · 14%

Walden

Thoreau

62%

Meditations

Aurelius

finished

The Wind in the Willows

Grahame

not started

Every book you open stays, and keeps its own place.

Point Paper at an .epub and it joins the shelf. Pick another and the first one waits exactly where you left it: mid-sentence, mid-page, months later.

Covers come out of the book itself, dithered to eight greys the way an e-reader prints a picture. A book without one gets its title set on a blank board, which is what a plain binding looks like anyway.

Reach it by long-pressing the page you are reading, or from the reader’s own footer. Everything here is text and paper: no store, no account, no library that lives on someone else’s server.

What it does

Reader-style home: Big serif clock set in Literata, the date, your favorite apps as a short text list. No icons, no widgets, no icon grid.
A book above the clock: Pick an .epub. Five lines at a time. Tap right to turn the page, left to go back. Your position is remembered; the EPUB parsing is built in.
The whole page, when you want it: Swipe right and the same book fills the screen, with the book’s own contents to jump by chapter. It shares one position with the pane above the clock, so putting it down leaves the five lines on the same word.
App index, not app drawer: Swipe up: every app as a line of text with section letters in the margin, an A–Z strip for fast scrolling, and a search where Enter launches the top hit.
System-wide grayscale: Toggles Android’s built-in color correction so the whole phone is gray, lock screen included. One adb grant, once, and the phone can even issue it to itself.
Paper, not pixels: A static grain shader on every surface, a Bayer dither for bitmaps, a warm-gray day palette and an OLED-friendly “dark ink” night mode.
Paper as wallpaper: One tap renders the grain as your home and lock wallpaper, so system transitions never flash your old one. Another tap seeds Material You from the paper tone, so even the keyboard matches the page.
A page while charging: A dim clock page as the screensaver, so the phone rests as quietly as it works.

Quiet on purpose

Colour is how a screen shouts.

A red dot on a green icon is not decoration; it is a claim on your attention, made by someone who is paid when it works. Paper takes the colour away, the whole phone and the lock screen with it, and most of the pull goes too. What is left is words, and words wait their turn.

A budget, in minutes: Give an app a daily ration. When it is spent the page says “out of pages for today” and makes you mean it.
Read a page first: The app index opens after a page of your book. A small toll, paid in the thing you said you wanted to do more of.
A letter on Sunday: Your week as a short letter rather than a chart: pages turned, where the hours went, and no advice.
All of it optional: Every one of these ships switched off. Paper is not here to manage you. It is here to stop competing with you.

Everything else, one toggle each

Weather line: The sky’s one-liner, resting under the clock.
Calendar line: 16:00 · dentist. The next thing, nothing more.
Screen time: “1h 40m on the screen today,” said plainly.
Correspondence: Messages arrive as letters on the page; reply inline, in text.
Unread marks: A small count beside a favorite. No red. No badge.
Notes: One sheet that keeps itself, and can be handed whole to the secretary.
Timers in search: Type “4m tea” in the index. That’s the timer app.
Contacts in search: Call or text straight from the app index.
The pause: Three seconds of blank paper between the reflex and the app. Most reflex-opens don’t survive it.
Evening mode: After 21:00 the page turns to ink and non-favorites wait until morning.
Almanac: The moon’s phase, in a line.
Motto: One sentence of your choosing, under the favorites.
Volume-key pages: The volume buttons turn the book’s pages, reader-style.

Every one of them ships turned off. Paper does nothing until you ask.

Deliberately absent

No icons. No widgets. No animations. No analytics.

Nothing is collected about you, there is no account, and the app cannot show you an advertisement because there is nowhere to put one. E-paper does not shimmer, which is why nothing on this page moves, either.

How the pieces work

The grain: An AGSL runtime shader: static two-octave value noise. Nothing animates.
The book: An EPUB is a zip of XHTML: unzipped, read in spine order, tags stripped to prose, reflowed to the screen. Pagination measures real text layout, so pages never cut mid-word.
The gray: Android’s accessibility daltonizer in monochromacy mode, flipped through WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS: the same switch the OS uses, so the lock screen grays too.
The index: LauncherApps and the HOME role: every launchable activity as a line of text, work-profile apps marked with a small ʹ.
The keyboard’s color: Material You reads its palette from the wallpaper and falls back to stock blue on neutral paper, so Paper seeds the system palette with the paper tone directly.
The secretary: A managed agent in a hosted sandbox, its knowledge cloned from your git repositories on every question and written back when you tell it something lasting. A small proxy of your own keeps every credential off the phone.

The secretary

Sources done

About you · agents.md

Two kids; school runs on Tuesdays. Answer plainly, never hedge.

Knowledge repositories

1. you/paper-dataremove

https://github.com/you/repoadd

Repos are re-read on every question; push a change and the agent knows it. When you tell it something lasting, it writes it back, and a push puts it in your history, not a vendor’s.

Two flips left of home, a quiet secretary answers in ink.

A full agent in a Linux sandbox that browses, runs code and reads your calendar, with questions in the margin voice and answers typeset like the book. Speak instead of typing, if you like.

Its memory is a git repository you own. The secretary reads its knowledge from your repos and, when you tell it something lasting, writes it back: your life, versioned in markdown, on your own GitHub. Nothing sits in anyone else’s database.

Hand it the day’s notes and it returns a ledger: loops closed with researched answers, or reduced to one clear decision. Say research … and it disappears for a few minutes and comes back with a report.

Read this before you buy for the secretary

It runs on your own Gemini API key, and there is no version where it doesn’t. You create the key at Google AI Studio, paste it into Paper’s settings, and Google bills you directly for what you ask. Paper never sees the traffic and takes no cut. Knowledge repositories mean git repositories you own and push to.

That makes this half of Paper a tinkerer’s feature, and it’s sold as one. If handling an API key isn’t something you want to do, buy Paper for the pages: the launcher, the book, the index, the quiet. Leave the agent switched off, where it ships.

Questions

What is Paper?: An Android launcher, which is the app that draws your home screen. Paper replaces the grid of icons with a page: a serif clock, your favourite apps as a list of words, and the book you are reading above them. It costs $6.99 once, with no subscription.
Does Paper need the AI to be useful?: No. The launcher, the reader, the shelf, the app index and every optional line work with nothing configured. The secretary is one page of the app, it is switched off when you install it, and it needs a Google Gemini API key you create yourself.
Can I read ebooks on it?: Yes. Paper opens .epub files, keeps every book you have opened on a shelf with its cover, and remembers each one’s place. Five lines sit above the clock; swipe right and the same book fills the screen at the same word.
Does it really make the whole phone grayscale?: Yes, including the lock screen and other apps, using Android’s own colour-correction setting. It needs one permission granted over adb, once. A phone can issue that grant to itself in about five minutes without a computer.
Does Paper collect any data?: None. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising, no crash reporting. Anything the app knows stays on the phone, and the only network requests it makes are ones you switch on: the weather line, and the secretary if you give it a key.
Which phones does it work on?: Android 13 or newer. It is built for Pixels, and the paper grain needs the shader support that arrived in Android 13.
How is it different from other minimal launchers?: Most of them hide your apps behind a text list. Paper does that too, and then gives the space back to something worth reading: a book, at the exact word you left it. It is also grey by design rather than by theme, and it has no store, no upsell and no second tier.
Is there a free version?: No. One price, everything included, and no trial that expires. Google Play’s own refund window applies if it is not for you.

Get Paper

$6.99

Bought once, like a book. No subscription, no trial that expires, no second tier to unlock. Every feature on this page is in the app you buy.

Coming to Google Play

In closed testing now. The price and everything on this page are settled; only the store listing is waiting.

Android 13 or newer. Built for Pixels; the grain shader needs API 33.

What you buy is the launcher. The pages, the book, the index, the paper: all of it works the moment you install it, with nothing to configure and no account to make.

Two things ask something of you. System-wide grayscale needs one permission Android only grants over a cable, or from the phone to itself in about five minutes, which Paper walks you through. And the secretary needs your own Gemini API key, billed to you by Google: a tinkerer’s feature, off by default, and no part of what makes Paper worth using otherwise.

Nothing is collected. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising, no crash reports. The app has nowhere to send anything. The privacy policy is one short page, and it is the whole story.