Numo Launcher

Your phone has more apps than you can remember. You use about nine of them, and you spend the rest of your time looking for the others.

Numo swaps the hunting for typing. Swipe up and a keypad lands under your thumb. Press the keys that spell the app - 2-4-7 for Chrome, 9-4 for WhatsApp - and it is waiting above your thumb before you finish. Enter opens it.

It learns as you go. Whichever app you pick for a set of keys moves to the front next time, so after a week most things are one key and Enter.

Your contacts can live in the same search. Type a name, swipe right to call or left to message. Type ten digits and Numo offers to dial the number.

The rest is a normal home screen, built carefully. Pages, folders, widgets that actually resize, and drag-and-drop that moves things out of your way instead of refusing the drop. A dock you can recolour and resize. Icon packs, icon shapes and themed icons, set separately for the home screen and the drawer if you are particular about that sort of thing. Gestures on every edge, including double-tap to lock.

About that lock gesture. It uses Android's AccessibilityService API, because that is the only way an app can lock the screen without breaking fingerprint unlock. Numo's service does exactly one thing, the lock action, and nothing else. It reads nothing on your screen, receives no accessibility events, and collects no data. It stays off until you switch it on in Android's own Accessibility settings, and Numo explains all of this before it asks. Everything else in Numo works without it.

There is no internet permission in the app at all. Not a promise not to track you - the permission is simply absent, so nothing can leave your phone. No analytics, no account, no ads, no servers.

One honest warning: typing for an app feels wrong for about two days, because your thumb is used to hunting. Give it a week before you decide.