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.

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 make the whole phone grayscale?

No. Paper is grey wherever Paper draws — the home page, the index, the book, the wallpaper — and it leaves the rest of your phone alone. If you want the whole system grey, Android does it itself under Settings › Accessibility › Colour correction.

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.

Which phones does it work on?

Android 13 or newer, on any make. 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: 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 ↓ be a tester ↓

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

tap the right of the book to turn a page · write on the notes sheet.
three of Paper's pages, with scripted answers. The app also has the index, the shelf, the settings and a dozen optional lines.

Fifty seconds

the whole app, in the order you meet it

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 the keyboard’s Go key launches the top hit.
Grey on purpose: Every page Paper draws is warm grey and black, with no colour anywhere to catch your eye. It stops at its own edges: Paper does not reach into other apps or change a setting for your whole phone.
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.
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.

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.
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 make the whole phone grayscale?: No. Paper is grey wherever Paper draws — the home page, the index, the book, the wallpaper — and it leaves the rest of your phone alone. An earlier version flipped Android’s colour-correction setting for every app; that reached a long way outside a launcher and survived uninstalling it, so it is gone. If you want the whole system grey, Android does it itself under Settings › Accessibility › Colour correction.
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.
Which phones does it work on?: Android 13 or newer, on any make. The paper grain needs the shader support that arrived in Android 13, and that is the whole of it.
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.

Wanted: testers

Paper is finished and in testing. Before it can go on sale, Google wants twelve people to have used it for a fortnight — so twelve people get it before anyone can buy it.

You need an Android 13 phone you are willing to make boring, and the Google account email you use on it, because that is how Play lets a tester in. You get the paid app for nothing, and you keep it.

What is actually useful back: which gesture you reached for that was not there, and what made you put the phone down and pick your old launcher back up. Bug reports are welcome. Silence is fine too, and still counts.

The form writes an email in your own mail app and sends nothing on its own. This site has no server to send it to, which is also why there is no list you have to be removed from later.

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, and short of testers: Google wants twelve people to have run it for a fortnight before it can be sold. Ask for a copy and you get it free.

Android 13 or newer, any make; 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.

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.

Set in Literata (SIL OFL). No cookies, no trackers, nobody watching.