Z Launcher

» see zlauncher.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This one is a contract turned into a product. Nokia sold its devices business to Microsoft and the deal closed on 25 april 2014, and part of what changed hands was the right to put the name on a phone. What did not change hands was the people. So Nokia still had a building full of engineers who knew exactly how a phone should feel and no legal way to ship one.

On 19 june 2014, under two months later, they announced an Android launcher. TechCrunch's headline said Nokia had just trolled Microsoft, and the joke landed because Microsoft had bought Nokia partly to make Windows Phone work. Here was Nokia, eight weeks on, shipping taste onto the operating system that had beaten it.

i was thirty and had been on Android for a while by then, though not on this. still, the Nokia hardware in my past is real enough. The company that made the phones i grew up around spent 2014 making a home screen for somebody else's.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

It replaced the grid. Instead of pages of icons you had six things at the top of the screen, and Z Launcher picked those six from time of day and from what you had actually been opening lately. by then this idea was in the air, but the execution was good enough that reviewers who mock launchers for a living stopped to say so.

The other half was Scribble. You drew a letter anywhere on the home screen with a finger, badly, and it filtered down to whatever started with it. No search box and no keyboard, and nothing to tap into first. That is a small interaction and it is the kind of small interaction a company gets right only when it has spent fifteen years watching people hold phones.

It started as a pre-beta outside the Play Store, downloadable from zlauncher.com with a cap on how many people could get in, running on the Galaxy S4 and the Nexus 5 and not much else. In november 2014 Nokia announced the N1 tablet for China and Z Launcher was the default on it, which is the only piece of hardware it ever came preinstalled on.

~ what really happened ~

Updates stopped in 2016. honestly, that is the entire announcement. There was no farewell post and no sunset date, and the app simply sat in the store getting older until it was removed from Google Play in 2018. Nokia never explained it.

The reason is not mysterious even without a statement. The non-compete ran out and Nokia's brand went back onto phones through HMD Global from 2016, running ordinary Android. for whatever reason a launcher only made sense while the company was locked out of the thing it wanted to be doing. Once it was allowed back, the workaround had no job.

zlauncher.com still resolves. It serves an Italian page selling YouTube views now, about a hundred kilobytes of it, which is what happens to a domain nobody at a large company remembers to renew into a redirect. The best software Nokia shipped after it stopped being a phone company is now a scraped APK on forums, and the address is somebody else's business.

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