Square Home Revives Windows Phone Live Tiles on Android for About $2 a Year

3 articles · Updated · Android Police · May 28

Square Home let the author rebuild a Windows Phone-style home screen on Android, replacing the usual app grid with Live Tile-like panels after a 14-day free trial.
The setup surfaced weather, calendar, music, notes and photos directly on the home screen, making the phone feel more like a live dashboard and reducing how often apps needed to be opened.
Deep customization drove the appeal: tiles can be resized, recolored, animated and assigned separate actions, while spacing, rows and scrolling can be tuned to mimic classic Windows Phone.
A vertically scrolling layout and bold accent colors made the interface easier to scan than typical multi-page Android launchers, which the author said often feel visually busy and too similar.

Did Microsoft mistakenly abandon its 'ahead of its time' Live Tile interface for modern design?

Is the future of phone interfaces a dynamic dashboard instead of a static grid of apps?

With Nova Launcher's fall, is reviving old designs the new frontier for Android customization?